Mozilla today made available In-Content Preferences in nightly build of Firefox 15 which displays preferences with in the content area of the browser instead from a pop-up dialog window. Four students from Michigan State University worked on Firefox’s In-Content Preferences project for 16 weeks and submitted to Mozilla and today this feature is available in nightly-build of Firefox for testing.
Enabling In-Content Preferences in Firefox
In-Content preferences has not been enabled by default but user can visit about:config page and turn “browser.preferences.InContent” preference value to true and then as usual access options from Firefox menu>options>options or by visiting about:preferences page in the page browser.
In-Content Preferences page displays a menu of 8 category icons, those are: General, Tabs Content, Applications, Privacy, Security, Sync and Advanced. User can click on any one to view its preferences in detail and can get back to landing page by clicking on back button on top left of the page. Mozilla also plans to offer a “search bar” in future to access other Preferences when one preference is already opened.
Why in-content preferences instead of a dialog window?
For Windows users Preferences window always comes in their way once its opened and user can’t see the changes they applied when it is active, user has to close preferences window and check browser for changes and then he need to access options again which is not a good user experience which Mozilla trying to solve. This is one example we can say but there are more such.
Any one can easily say this UI interface change can be expected for Firefox browser as Chrome has in-tab settings page, they’re following Chrome but do remember Mozilla changed Add-ons manager dialog window to be accessible in the browser in Firefox 4 way back.
Note: Nightly Build has cutting edge feature and it is highly unstable and is not recommended for daily work.
Source: Jaws blog