> Well it's either flags, or a config file Actually: No. Well, at least not in the ridiculous way that Chrome or Firefox do it. Command line options or config

> Well it's either flags, or a config file Actually: No. Well, at least not in the ridiculous way that Chrome or Firefox do it. Command line options or config files are both fine - when used in moderation. The problem here (at least in part) is that it is extremely easy for devs to just add a configuration option. But it is much harder to think about whether a user would actually ever want to change the setting, if it had a good default value. In fact, I think maybe about 20 command line options would cover 99.9% of all usecases for chrome. - And it would be so much more understandable. - Both for the actual developers and the users. I absolutely despise it when a software product pushes effort downstream this way. --- Note: I fully understand that in Chrome these flags at least partially leak out of their "trunk-driven development". - But this is no excuse: In no way should the development environment leak out into a released product this way! - And it would be exceptionally easy to stop this too: Just disable all development flags in the release build.