pfSense

I had initially insisted that option default to off because it was horribly slow on ALIX and other low-end platforms at the time it was introduced, but most of those have gone EOL or won't be supported on 2.4 anyhow. Also the formatting left some things to be desired on 2.2.x.

On 2.4 the output being in another column seems to be the best-looking option, and it doesn't seem to be too bad on SG-1000 speed-wise at the default 50 lines of output. Also using a second row seems to be a tad slower.

Some envelope style calculations for 10 iterations at 50 (default) and 500 lines of firewall log data on an SG-1000, which is for all intents and purposes the minimum specs for 2.4:

Setting         Lines   Avg Time (sec)
No Descr        50      1.673
Descr Col       50      1.918
Descr Row       50      1.935
No Descr        500     6.099
Descr Col       500     6.435
Descr Row       500     6.514       

So overall it only adds 1/4 to 1/2 sec on average to load them in a second column on the slowest hardware we have on hand that runs 2.4. The 50 line case takes the bigger hit at a 14.64% increase vs 5.51% increase on 500 lines, but either way it's probably worth it now to default it on for new configs.

It is worth noting that the above numbers were with a minimal ruleset, it would be worth repeating the test with a more complicated ruleset that had a wider variety of log data to work with. The speed result was what was displayed by using Firebug's net panel while clicking the tab name to refresh the log (F5 caused it to refresh more page assets/content rather than only reloading the page)

Nice timings. ;) Just for a giggle, I tried with Alix and 2.3.3: the times are ~ 6.5s with 50 lines and ~25s with 500 lines (with the description column view and pretty small ruleset, using the Google Chrome timeline.)

Just verified as well, but a little late to the plate it appears. fresh install of CE from 20170302(https://snapshots.pfsense.org/amd64/pfSense_master/installer/pfSense-CE-2.4.0-BETA-amd64-20170302-0727.iso.gz) within a VM has default selection of "Display as Column". Existing install that was updated to 2.4 (on SG-2220) preserved pre-existing selection for the drop down in question.