Tweak

One of the core goals of Opera has always been to provide you, to our best approximation, with the browser that makes the web available to everyone, and to give anyone the most comfortable way to surf the web. The way we handle features and configuration follows the following approximate formula:

• Normal browsing features: included, on by default
  
• Comfort features: included, can be disabled from the UI
  
• Features to make the web more accessible: feature included, UI to make use of feature might be second tier if it gets in the way for the majority that doesn't need it
  
• Finetuning features: configurable via Advanced prefs (if a significant minority might find it useful) or by editing text-based ini files
  
• Features to keep old users happy: feature included, disabled by default, configurable via UI or by editing text-based ini files
  

Note that "features to make the web more accessible" are not "bloat" or a "distraction for developers". Such features are very much needed for our mobile browsers, and it makes little sense to not make them available or try them out in the desktop version of Opera. Hence things like "Fit to window width" and "Voice". And from old times: disable image loading, plugins, javascript etc. In Opera 9 you will get site-specific preferences, to make it easier to use the accessiblity options when necessary, and use the web as the authors intended by default. Or the other way around! To keep a sane and understandable interface, not all preferences can be made site-specific in 9.0. Experience and feedback will tell how the UI will need to improve or make more or less prefs available in this context.

"Editing text-based ini files" can be somewhat hard to explain to potential power users. Opera 9 will include a built-in editor for opera6.ini to make this easier. Of course we can have long discussions about what the default settings should be, and which settings should be delegated to opera.ini. The built-in editor is not meant as a alternative interface for the Preferences, so the latter should contain all the things a 'normal' user might want to change once in a while.

This posting is inspired by Firefox developer Ben's latest post Battling Firefox Bloat. The problem I have with the Firefox philosophy: almost everyone is a member of a minority, and usually member of a few minorities. So with Firefox, everyone has to manage a set of extensions for necessary (for them) features or nice-to-have comfort features like "Mouse gestures" and "Paste and Go".

And it has become clear that you can not trust the extension developers to stay passionately involved over many years, so it can be days or months after installing a new Firefox version before it is working again as it used to do. Opera's text-based ini files can be a bit more clunky to work with, and less powerful, but the advantage is that anyone with a text editor can find out how to do it. To write an Firefox extension, you need to know a fair bit of JavaScript at least, if not XUL.

Update: also read David Baron's concerns about Firefox maybe relying too much on extensions.