bjf: do a simple thought experiment. Pick 5 perpetual intermediate users at random, and see if they know what effect those options have. I certainly don't know, and I even have some reasonable idea of what SSL is. Now imagine the other 100 or so options, and 5 or so dialogs they plan to add, plus all the others that will get added.

The Mozilla people have tried to please all the users before: it was called Seamonkey, and it was a total UI disaster. Firebird appears to be heading in the same direction.

If you can't understand the benefits of a "small core, lots of powerful extensions" approach, I can only assume that you've never used Seamonkey, or you've no experience of the vast majority of browser users out there. Sys admins needing to configure a deployment of browsers, web developers, "more configured than thou" geeks, and such, are quite capable of installing extensions, using about:config etc. There's absolutely no reason to imperil the default browser for normal users for these minorities.