[Flashblock] User contributed FF1.5 PrefWindow overlay discussion

[Philip Chee]

Neil Stansbury <neil.stansbury at redbacksystems.com>
Recently submitted to us a Prefpane overlay for the
Firefox 1.5 Options window. This adds a "Enable Flash" option
in the contents tab. I fiddled with it and gotten it to work,
but there are several problems.

1. Firefox/Mozilla.org developers policy is to discourage
extension developers from adding their own UI to the FF
options window.

2. The FF 1.5 options window is not resizable. Adding UI
to it pushes down the bottom elements, sometimes making
the last option inaccessible.

3. insertafter/insertbefore is not implemented in PrefwindowsV.
Items added via an overlay are added to the top of the window.
Neil has a kludge that causes the items to rearrange but this
is not reliable and if the FF developers change the order of
items, this kludge may have unexpected effects.

Since turning Flashblock on/off is still available from the
Flashblock options dialog, and from the Flashblock toolbar
button. I think that there is too much downside to adding
this compared to rather limited (if any) increase in
functionality. Since our policy is to avoid unnecessary bloat
I suspect that this proposed patch is a WONTFIX.

However I would like to encourage Neil to continue submitting
his suggestions and insights to the flashblock mailing list.
And [interesting] code contributions are always welcome.

Cheers.

Phil.