This is difficult to research, because all the keywords are quite generic...
A Thunderbird extension that I just wrote warrants changes in Thunderbird's main preferences dialog, because one particular setting collides with the extension's function and renders the latter useless if chosen/set.
I would like to do one or better both of these things:
1) Untick a checkbox and change the state of a radio button.
2) Altogether deactivate a checkbox or a radio button.
I found the following code snippet, which might do what I intend (at least for point 1) above):
var pref = Components.classes['@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1'].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefBranch);
pref.setIntPref("dom.max_script_run_time", 30);
If it does, I still have the problem of finding out the IDs of the preferences I want to change. The DOM-Inspector extension obviously does not work on the open preferences dialog window... so how do I know which preference to set?
And how do I overlay the preferences dialog in order to deactivate widgets? Is this at all possible? Or can I deactivate widgets programmatically (as soon as I have their ID?)