User:FunnyMan3595:Tutorial Mode Thoughts

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Tutorial mode

There's a bit of a dilemma where explanitory and cautionary messages are concerned: They are essental for novices but frustrating for pros, even if only shown once. At the moment, a good example within Firefox eludes me (though I'm sure there are some), but the one that comes to mind is the drive root hiding that WinXP does on first startup. Novices really shouldn't be messing with that, but any experienced user has a pretty good idea what's safe and what's not, especially if they're coming from another installation of WinXP. In fact, WinXP has a bunch of that kind of message, to the point where you find yourself wishing for a button somewhere labelled "I am not an idiot!"

The problem here is that the company that shall not be named has decided to be user friendly to the point where you expect an airbag when it crashes, leaving the experts banging their heads on the padded walls. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the command-line *nixes, which come with no obvious user instruction at all. The novice is left perplexed, especially as the only obvious command (help) is usually of no help at all.

Now, both ends of the spectrum have their uses, hence it makes sense to use both. I suggest giving a prompt on first launch (per profile) that allows you to select from "Full tutorial / New to the web", "Firefox tutorial / New to Firefox", "New feature tutorial / New to this version", and "No tutorial / Guru" (aka my "I am not an idiot!" button from above). Basically, they all specify a level of messages to show. Full Tutorial should include everything that a new user needs to know to start browsing the web. Firefox tutorial should concentrate on pointing out where the elements that they're familiar with have gone, including that Bookmarks=Favorites, Options(=Preferences) is under Tools, etc. New to this version points out new features and changed behaviors (might want to include a way to specify which version they're coming from rather than assuming the most recent). No tutorial, naturally, turns it all off.