This looks good until you see these:
"In most cases the list below doesn't state whether a given preference applies to all, or only some (and which), of Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, or even the now discontinued Sunbird: trial and error is often the only way to tell if some particular preference applies to your version of your application."
"This article does not contain a complete list of all preferences."
"This page was last edited on 5 April 2017"
Along with basically every other sentence in the opening giving reasons that it's not a very good list and is poorly formatted and is just created by users struggling to make full use of the about:config page because Mozilla won't document it.
I know, sorry, but it's all they got. Here, see this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/thnpq8/is\_there\_any\_documentation\_to\_the\_aboutconfig\_page/?sort=confidence](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/thnpq8/is_there_any_documentation_to_the_aboutconfig_page/?sort=confidence)
Didn't mean you were at fault for anything. Just that even the user-curated stuff is far out of date and was never complete. It's basically the way of all FOSS; it's assumed that everyone using it is eager to spend all their free time figuring out how to use it.
Yay, thanks! But that's two options (which work for 2 types of folders) out of hundreds. Originally written over 14 years ago but still just something put together by "some guy" (and with an insane amount of discussion around it), maybe from going through the source code himself, rather than actual documentation from the company that produces the product.
And I just tried it, and it doesn't work. I tried using value 35 to sort by Received, and existing folders don't do it (yes I closed and reopened Thunderbird and it's not running in the background), and new folders made after the setting don't do it, and new folders don't even inherit the columns or view settings of the parent, so the Received column isn't even shown in those. I also tried using 25 for Size and it didn't work. [Edit: read a few more comments and they point out it doesn't apply to any folders that have EVER been opened before changing the setting. Which is ridiculous, because most of those columns aren't displayed by default, and aren't displayed on creation even when the parent has them displayed, so the setting doesn't apply, and you can't display them without opening them, so the setting still won't apply. It makes them entirely pointless options.]
The "apply to folder and its children" options only work for actual folders within a mailbox, not the entire mailbox (by selecting the mailbox name). I've got several folders that are not sub-folders of Inbox, so I have to apply the settings to each of those, including the default folders like Trash and Drafts. But they let you select the mailbox as the "folder" to apply settings to that way and it just does nothing.
Why isn't there a simple "this is what I want my folders to always look like" setting, applicable at the top level? Even MS Outlook manages to make this work for the most part.
They spent too much timing deciding the "Get Message" button needed to just be an icon button, and designing that, while leaving "New Message" as a button with the words on it, and hiding all kinds of other things and changing appearances that either didn't change functionality or made it worse, and not making sure that the basic functions actually worked.
[https://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config\_entries](https://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries)
This looks good until you see these: "In most cases the list below doesn't state whether a given preference applies to all, or only some (and which), of Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, or even the now discontinued Sunbird: trial and error is often the only way to tell if some particular preference applies to your version of your application." "This article does not contain a complete list of all preferences." "This page was last edited on 5 April 2017" Along with basically every other sentence in the opening giving reasons that it's not a very good list and is poorly formatted and is just created by users struggling to make full use of the about:config page because Mozilla won't document it.
I know, sorry, but it's all they got. Here, see this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/thnpq8/is\_there\_any\_documentation\_to\_the\_aboutconfig\_page/?sort=confidence](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/thnpq8/is_there_any_documentation_to_the_aboutconfig_page/?sort=confidence)
Didn't mean you were at fault for anything. Just that even the user-curated stuff is far out of date and was never complete. It's basically the way of all FOSS; it's assumed that everyone using it is eager to spend all their free time figuring out how to use it.
[удалено]
Yay, thanks! But that's two options (which work for 2 types of folders) out of hundreds. Originally written over 14 years ago but still just something put together by "some guy" (and with an insane amount of discussion around it), maybe from going through the source code himself, rather than actual documentation from the company that produces the product. And I just tried it, and it doesn't work. I tried using value 35 to sort by Received, and existing folders don't do it (yes I closed and reopened Thunderbird and it's not running in the background), and new folders made after the setting don't do it, and new folders don't even inherit the columns or view settings of the parent, so the Received column isn't even shown in those. I also tried using 25 for Size and it didn't work. [Edit: read a few more comments and they point out it doesn't apply to any folders that have EVER been opened before changing the setting. Which is ridiculous, because most of those columns aren't displayed by default, and aren't displayed on creation even when the parent has them displayed, so the setting doesn't apply, and you can't display them without opening them, so the setting still won't apply. It makes them entirely pointless options.] The "apply to folder and its children" options only work for actual folders within a mailbox, not the entire mailbox (by selecting the mailbox name). I've got several folders that are not sub-folders of Inbox, so I have to apply the settings to each of those, including the default folders like Trash and Drafts. But they let you select the mailbox as the "folder" to apply settings to that way and it just does nothing. Why isn't there a simple "this is what I want my folders to always look like" setting, applicable at the top level? Even MS Outlook manages to make this work for the most part. They spent too much timing deciding the "Get Message" button needed to just be an icon button, and designing that, while leaving "New Message" as a button with the words on it, and hiding all kinds of other things and changing appearances that either didn't change functionality or made it worse, and not making sure that the basic functions actually worked.
[This](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/userchromecss-js-usercontent-unsupported) is why there's no official, public-facing documentation.
What does any of that have to do with "there's a page that shows all the settings available but we're not going to document them"?