When reading BenGoodger's weblog that had been /topic'd in #mozilla
(http://www.bengoodger.com/weblog/archives/week_2003_01_19.shtml#000285) I had
an idea what we could do to pur prefs window so it would probably fit the
needs of people better.

First, I don't think we should completely remove all of this prefs UI, and I
generally think that the basic design of the prefs window is good, i.e. I
think we should still have panel navigation in some form on the left, and
panels on the right part of the window.

But I think we shouldn't throw 43 pref panels at all our users (what we do now
in default configuration), a normal user can't and doesn't want to deal with
all those things.
I propose to show a maximum of 5 panels (having navigator, mailnaews, and
composer installed) to the average user, having an icon and the panel name for
all of those in the navigation part of the window, along with an additional
icon at the bottom with the 'panel' name "Extended Mode" (I come back to what
it does).
Those max. 5 panels will show only the most commonly used options, and no
specialities in any way (we could take a look into the internet options panels
on Windows). We'd perhaps have a basic appearance panel left, one for the
browser, one for mail/news, one e.g. for connections (basic proxy settings
etc.), and one for security stuff. If the average user is expected to tweak
anything more, we should consider our defaults to be bad, IMHO...

A click on the "Extended Mode" icon/text will change the navigation pane: the
icons will collapse to one single icon on the top that now says "Basic Mode",
and below that we'll have a pref tree in the style of our current one, having
roughly the same panels (some need cleanups, a small number of them can
perhaps even disappear completely), grouped into roughly the same categories
as the basic panels. (The "advanced" category should either be renamed or
split into categories with names that people can deal with, IMO.) The panel
for the main categories could probably be the same panels as in "Basic Mode"
(where we have one).
Clicking on "Basic Mode" will change the nav pane back to what it was before,
of course.

This is just a basic idea, and if we think we should go this way or a similar
way, I think we still have to create and discuss a real spec for that, and so
on.

I hope we'll be able to make prefs clearer and more helpful for novices while
still retaining configuration power for experts and 'geeks'...