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Et Tu, Mozilla? Firefox 3 To Get Privacy Mode
CWmike writes "Mozilla will respond to Google's Chrome and Microsoft's IE8 with its own private-browsing, or 'porn' mode in Firefox, according to notes posted on its Web site, and is on track to deliver one in 3.1, the version that will likely go beta next month."
What's wrong with a little realism? Viewing porn is one of the major uses of a web browser, thus such a facility is practically a no-brainer.
Safari has had a private/pr0n browsing mode for 3+ years...
Well what have I been using all this time then?
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
firefox has had plugins for this for some time, they just weren't there by default.
True.
First page I found in Google:
http://lifehacker.com/software/privacy/download-of-the-day-stealther-firefox-extension-174752.php
When you have a good extension system, not everything needs to be incorporated anymore. Like an Adblocker...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
I already know how to hide pr0n from the missus, I just need you to get it to me *FASTER*!
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Just press CTRL-SHIFT-DEL after youre done with the pr0n. It can also be done automagically every time you logout.
HTTP/1.1 400
"However, it was yanked several months ago during Version 3.0's development."
Shouldn't this be called default mode?
By default I put my snail mail in envelopes (keep my correspondence private), by default I put on clothes (keep my privates... private), and by default I expect the police are not searching my house or tapping my phone (4th Amendment privacy). Why isn't my browser private by defa.... oh wait, it's not my browser, it belongs to MS Google Mozilla, nevermind.
Mozilla follows Microsoft's lead.
(takes wagers on how this gets modded)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I can think of LOTS of other uses. For instance..
um...
ah, no wait, I've almost got it....
um........
Ok, I'll get back to you on this one.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Uh, I know CWmike wants to promote Computerworld and all, but really a link to at least one of the "notes posted on its website" would have also been helpful..
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
Lets face it. Pornography has been around since the dawn of the internet and in all that time not one browser, newsreader or email client ever offered a "privacy mode" until recently. We're talking since BBS days here. Yes there are some people who would like to spin, or frame, these features as "porn mode". But this is a fairly transparent attempt to discredit what is an important, appropriate and yes disruptive new innovation.
And what has spurred this innovation? What necessity has been the mother of this invention? Porn? No. Thing far more unsettling than that. Phishers, fraudsters, malware have all played their part. People need more protection nowadays. But most of the reasons for privacy features can be summed up in one word.
Marketers.
Modern marketers are utterly relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever. They are are with enormous databases, and the desire to fill them with as much data as they can lay their hands on. Tracking users and their habits online, and assaulting them with advertisements based on that data has become an industry in itself. Every social networking website, every online newspaper, every site that has any ability to track its users whatsoever is piping that data straight to an eager marketing department which presumably has some method concocted to throw ads back at users who would rather be left alone.
This is international information collection on an unprecedented scale in human history. To be sure, as of now this is only a practice of private enterprise, the current databases are disorganized and incompatible. But this is a new industry, essentially only a decade or so old. What will happen when its methods, theories and processes standardize? How dangerous will those databases be then?
Google is not blameless in this either. Remember that the company makes its money not on searches, but on advertisements that it offers on its search pages and on other sites. That company is tracking probably the majority of web user by now, and any site that you go to that is affiliated with Google (this includes Slashdot), dutifully makes sure that your presence their and what you are doing is made known to Seattle, so that they may better know your habits. You think they'll just sit on all that juicy marketing data till the end of time and forever "Do No Evil"? Get real. They are a private company and will do whatever they like as long as it is legal. Watch it happen.
So go ahead, call it a "porn" feature, but the reality is that those browsing for porn will probably not even bother to turn it on. It will only be used by those who understand just how dangerous so much personal data in private hands can be.
Make no mistake, this is a disruptive technology. Marketers will not like it. Webmasters will not like it. Google will not like it. So expect substantial mudslinging surrounding this issue in the months to come.
May the Maths Be with you!
Pr0n mode can kill free pr0n in theory.
Pretty much every single free porn site on the Internet makes money via affiliate programs. They offer free content in an attempt to sell you a membership to the pay site that the content comes from. The way the affiliate clicks are tracked is via cookies. If every web browser has an easy way to toggle cookie-saving while browsing porn then free porn sites could end up losing a ton of money. They'll go under if such browsing practices become the norm and affiliate programs can't figure out a better way to track than cookies. And avoiding tracking is one of the obvious purposes here.
So a tip to surfers. If you have absolutely no intention of purchasing a pay-site membership ever then leave the cookies off and don't sweat it. But if you purchase porn at all then you're not doing your favourite free site(s) any service by browsing with cookies off.
Dude, Latin, not French.
With IE8 having the functionality to log keystrokes and send those back home the level of privacy is debatable.
From the IE8 Privacy statement, that almost no one will go though the trouble of reading:
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings,"
Granted Suggested Sites is optional, but that this function is built in in the first place would make me highly uncomfortable if I were using Windows. Especially since "secret" changes of EULA's is a quite common practice. It would be interesting to know how many users that will embrace this "feature" blissfully unaware of the invasion of privacy they have been tricked into with IE8 defaulting to "Yes, turn on Suggested Sites," when asking the user "Do you want to discover websites you might like based on websites you've visited?". Which for many will seem like a great thing at first thought.
I have a hard time seeing coming to Firefox or Opera for that matter as at least these two browser makers actually do care about their users privacy.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
What I would personally like is to be able to add certain sites to a password-protected "privacy list", so that visits to those sites would be stealthed, while visits to other sites would not. I don't want to have to start a special private session, which seems like a pretty lame way to do it. Mozilla should have looked at how to improve this feature by adding something like that, for example. Unfortunately it looks like Mozilla are just implementing the same thing as IE and Chrome, instead of looking to improve on it.
Oh no... it's the future.
The privacy mode was included in some alphas of Firefox 3.0. The developers decided to postpone this feature because the release of 3.0 was already delayed.
Specifically, the mode would:
* Discard all cookies acquired during the private session.
* Not record sites visited to the browser's history.
* Not autofill passwords, and not prompt the user to save passwords.
* Remove all downloads done during the session from the browser's download manager.
These are good web surfing practices to begin with. These seem more like bug fixes to me. Why not make them the default? Why would I ever want to browse without these safeguards?
True.
First page I found in Google:
http://lifehacker.com/software/privacy/download-of-the-day-stealther-firefox-extension-174752.php
When you have a good extension system, not everything needs to be incorporated anymore. Like an Adblocker...
Absolutely. I've used Stealther for a long while. It's the first thing I download (followed by NoScript) and... Well... I don't see a reason to incorporate that to FF. It's quick to get it and easy to find for anyone who wishes to have such... It works just like the extensions are supposed to work in FF!
(That said, the stealther should get some bug fixes. It doesn't remove whole history but if visiting example.com and example2.com before putting it on, then visiting example2.com and example3.com and turning it off again, example 2 has been removed from history, etc.)
Actually, aren't most of these features built in already? It's built into the Options -> Privacy tab.
According to the article, "privacy mode" would do the following:
* Discard all cookies acquired during the private session.
* Not record sites visited to the browser's history.
* Not autofill passwords, and not prompt the user to save passwords.
* Remove all downloads done during the session from the browser's download manager.
All of those things can be set on the Privacy tab, in Options. Am I wrong?
Can't you already turn off the history, cookies, and the cache, not to mention remembered passwords?
How is this different, or did they take these features out in V3? I still use V2 since V3 kept crashing my box.
Simply a case of competition driving another cycle of improvement. Those people who like to claim there's no reason for open source developers to improve and innovate often forget that your basic human being is a competitive critter at heart.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
What I would personally like is to be able to add certain sites to a password-protected "privacy list", so that visits to those sites would be stealthed, while visits to other sites would not. I don't want to have to start a special private session, which seems like a pretty lame way to do it. Mozilla should have looked at how to improve this feature by adding something like that, for example. Unfortunately it looks like Mozilla are just implementing the same thing as IE and Chrome, instead of looking to improve on it.
Let me be sure I've got this. Your proposal on how to keep from generating lists of sites you don't want people to know you visit, is to generate a list of sites you don't want people to know you visit.
Brilliant!
I mean, free porn sites are not the most trustworthy sites in the world. It's good that there's disincentive to use the same browser to do your on-line banking and your porn hunting.
It'd be better to do questionable things in a separate virtual machine.
In the early days of the web browsers were innocuous. The worst you could do is download and run malware. Sensible people used to protect their machines by being careful about executable attachments to their email.
Now that applications are becoming net-centric, and browsing has become a kind of universal content delivery mechanism, things aren't so simple.
I'm wondering whether running different tabs in different processes might not be enough. Perhaps tabs shouldn't be a UI facade for a process, but for entire virtual machines.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
direct link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306
It has 820.000 downloads, so it's not like people have been missing this functionality from firefox...
No, you're not wrong. 'Privacy mode' just sets all those flags in one fell swoop.
Privacy Mode is such a non-story, it's not even funny. I could have written an extension to do just this in about five minutes.
My blog
The point of the privacy option is it makes it much easier to keep useful things like cookes and history for your day to day browsing while also allowing you to surf anonymously for your "private sites".
How private is it if you boss can still look over your shoulder and see where you're at. Now if "privacy mode" can prevent that, THAT would be really privacy.
Oh, wait! Nevermind.....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Stealther is very strict. If you wish to log on to a site that uses cookies to remember your session, you can't, because there's no cookies allowed in Stealther mode.
FireFox/FireBird/Phoenix/FireWhatever has from day one featured an option for scraping any traces (and same for Mozilla and Netscape).
The subtlety is that until now the control was rather coarse (you could either remove most of the traces or leave all of them. You could chose *which traces* : history, cache, cookies, etc. but *not wich tabs* you removed all cookies or all urls etc.).
Whereas now you can fine tune for only some tabs.
(although cookies could be changed from permanent to session-only for specific URLs)
On the other hand, I was under the impression that Inter Explorer until very recently had the capability to only remove some traces (it was possible to purge the cache with a simple button click, but not all other forms of traces). But I haven't been a regular IE user, so I can't reliably assert whether or not IE could scrap all traces.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
so it would not allow you to quit, minimize, or hide the window, and maybe play an audio file ("HEY EVERYBODY! I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!"). Sounds good.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The AC is a troll, but link to Privoxy is relevant and informative.
I'd love to post a reply to this, but am too busy watching porn!
When you have a good extension system, not everything needs to be incorporated anymore. Like an Adblocker...
On the other hand, some other things are so much useful, that I would be nice to have them packaged together with the installer, so users can easily select them if they wish.
(That's already the case with the crash-report tool)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I will not be convinced of browser privacy modes to be fully effective until browsers decide to also have that carried over into the flash realm. I have confirmed that even in Safari's private mode; flash ads and programs still set cookies, and they are not erased when the session is closed like everything else. I find it also more frustrating that because it is flash; this cookie information goes across browsers since it is stored outside the realm of the browser. For the record i also find it frustrating and convoluted on how one must actually go to some web site on adobe.com to remove flash data like that.
All of those things can be set on the Privacy tab, in Options. Am I wrong?
The subtle difference is that since the old NetScape days, the pivacy can only controlled for the whole browser :
You either scrap your whole history or you keep it.
In Chrome, Safari and starting from version 3.1 of FireFox :
one tab could be in private mode (for example not saving any cookie nor cache) while the next tab could be a normal tab with your usual web AJAX application running.
Although I fail to realise who could simultaneously need to be able to fap at some p0rn in one tab while writting TPS reports at the very same time in the next tab.
That's multitasking taken to some really weird proportion.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You can't make an association with "et tu, Brute?" on the betrayal of friendship on the basis that X and Y did something and now Z is doing something too. The comparison is completely without substance, and the only vague relation I can fathom is that now all browsers betray wives and girlfriends by hiding porn-surfing habits. But I can't imagine Slashdot playing the privacy haters' "only the naughty want privacy" card. Nerds, drink deep or taste not of the non-computer-oriented spring.
(that is if there weren't already so many out there)
My blog
Same reason I dont buy porn in airports no?
And this has been another installament of Captain Obvious!
I read it as maori for "Stand Up" ("e tu"). But obviously realised as bad french for "And you". I think maybe "Firefox, aussi" would have been much better. XD
signature is pants
820 isn't that many, it could be one person downloading it obsessively, even. I assume your using US numeric notation because you used a en-US link.
lol: You see no door there!
Oh goody. Safe porn surfing.
How about fixing the half dozen REAL FRICKING annoying bugs in FF3?
Maybe Chrome will be ready before FF2 dies.
Anything is possible given time and money.
don't worry, Google still knows you did it even if you've tried hard to forget.
Delerium Tremens, your UID, is not correct French, either.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
I'm assuming you don't normally expect strict secrecy from your wife regarding your correspondence, your house, your phone, and your...privates. If you do expect that, you'll probably have to engage in non-default behavior. Just like here.
That house, phone, and privates all belong to her because I married her. Using your analogy, would it be too much to ask for a purely platonic web browser without everyone flaming me as commitment phobic? ;-)
Speaking of, I'm really confused by the headline... Who's asking Mozilla "Et tu"? We the users? Google? Microsoft?
In short, whom is Mozilla betraying and who is about to die?
It's a bit more complex than that. Apart those mentioned in the grandparent, which would most definitely take more than five minutes to do, you have to modify code for more things: content preferences (like zoom and text size), DOM storage (which is basically cookies on steroids), phishing/malware checking, disk cache, link colouring, favicons...
Maybe not a huge change (the current patch is about 100KB in size), but I think some of these things would be somewhat difficult (if not impossible) to do via extensions.
Heh. Well my girlfriend tends to be very curious when she gets wind that I'm shopping for her. I have my own laptop+login so it's not likely she'll get a my browser, but if she did it would be nice to know she wouldn't be able to pull up my online shopping/browsing history. As it is I have to hide the presents to prevent her from poking/shaking/sniffing/investigating them in attempts to guess the content :-)
Or the section where you add/remove/view items on the list could be encrypted+password-protected. For extra privacy, have different passwords return different lists (see honey, the only thing on here is online shopping sites, no pr0n).
You can disable the "disable cookies" option in the settings, leaving all other option available then Stealther is active. I also tried adding the functionality of having a "temporary cookie store" but things got messy, so I kept the current functionality, upgrading the add-on mostly only to keep up with the Firefox releases. Looks like it will soon be obsolete anyway, so thanks to everyone for using it ;) /author
That sounds right, the "new" idea is that you can turn it on and off quickly.
Curse those banner ads and adult dating sites (adultfriendfinder plz die)
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
So do you also keep your clothes closet locked so no one can see your underwear, and do you keep the number of the page of any book you might be reading in a vault instead of using a bookmark and then destroy the book after finishing it?
You would probably be unaware of the obvious.
lol: You see no door there!
Well, having used the free (gratis) nagware version of Sandboxie, I found it useful enough to cough up $20 or something for a non-nagware version. Doing this in the browser is the wrong place, but running your browser in a sandbox you genuinely protect yourself from sites which scribble all over your system (cookies, history, stored passwords, changed bookmarks, dodgy add-ons, ...). You *don't* protect yourself from spyware which scrapes there and then, but you can chuck away and filesystem or registry changes.
A sandbox also means that you can revert to a previously clean system should you have a time limitted demo which writes some obscure registry key.
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
What's happened to Firefox recently? A few months ago all of the stories about it were 'Firefox implements new, innovative, feature' or 'Firefox gets even faster!' Now the best we see are 'Firefox implements feature that Safari, Chrome, and even IE already had!' and 'Firefox Javascript engine slightly faster than Chrome and Safari on synthetic benchmark Apple engineers designed to test their worst-case performance!'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The Distrust extension for Firefox DOES remove flash cookies, and it sits as a convenient toggle-button in the status-bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1559
At least in my opinion, it's a lot nicer to just click a button and browse privately, and then click it again after you're finished than to have to open up a whole new window like in Chrome. I really think the "open new Incognito window" would be more usable if it was an "open new Incognito tab", instead. Although maybe that's just my opinion.
It's effectively virtual machine snapshots+rollback for the browser. Enabling porn mode makes the snapshot, and disabling it or closing the window (or however it's triggered) executes the rollback.
Which, truth be told, would be a much less detectable and more foolproof way to have a porn mode, if you're that concerned about it.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Stealther has deleted my entire history/downloads/saved form information/etc on several occasions, and judging by the reviews, I'm not alone. I think that's caused by leaving it on when closing the browser (which would explain why some people seem to have no problems), but I'm not really willing to lose all my browsing information again.
819.5 819.9995 The difference is very important.
Of course, given we're talking about an integer, it's more likely to be a typo and a missing comma, but what's slashdot without a little pedantry?
You may now mod me overrated by screwing up my own pedantry.
I set Firefox to clear all personal information whenever I shut it down. I have it configured not to accept non-session cookies unless they're from sites I've white listed. How is privacy mode different? Or, is it merely that it opts not to store files (or add anything to the browsing history) in real time, i.e. not just when you close the application?
(although cookies could be changed from permanent to session-only for specific URLs)
So reddit or many other sites, for example, keeps asking if you are over 18 and won't allow you past until you allow it to set a cookie. With a sandboxed approach, the site can set the cookie to its hearts content and you, the user, know that the sandbox will be wiped clean when you close the browser/tab.
Congratulation, you successfully described a "session" cookie.
BTW that's my default type of cookies (Setting : "consider all cookies as session cookies". Then only put exception to the couple of website where I really need cookies carying data from one session to another).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What? That's a third-party add-on. That's like saying "Sure XP can make PDFs, its had that ability for years, you just need to install PDFCreator add-on!"
Joe Software User doesnt know what an add-on is.
Also, we're ignoring the question of trust here. Who verifies this app? Who has done testing? If I can still find traces of browsing and I tell Mozilla, they'll wash their hands of it.
Now, Mozilla is responsible for this feature which means theres a little accountability here. That's a huge change. Joe Shmoe will now be able to see it and click on it. Not to mention the headache of constantly updating your add-ons everytime there's a .1 release.
Back in the days of Firefox 2, you could surf with no worries. All you had to do was avoid typing the porn site into the address bar, and you left no noticeable traces. This meant that bookmarks and links (think search results) left virtually no traces.
If you screwed-up, you could easily erase your browsing history. If you were really paranoid, you could turn off cookies while you browsed as well.
Then, along came Firefox 3 with the Awfulbar(TM). Suddenly, your entire web access history plus bookmarks were laid bare, and suddenly there was a need for a privacy mode. I've personally managed to get around the whole annoyance by using "show only typed" with Oldbar (behaves like Firefox 2), but for most general users this is far too complicated.
Of course, they could just make us all entirely happy by removing the Awfulbar(TM), but I'm not expecting miracles.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Average Joe doesn't even know what flash cookies are, let alone how to turn them off, but that doesn't matter because Average Jane doesn't know what they are either or where to look for them.
Average Joe's big worry is that Average Jane will go to check her emails and as she types the hot in hotmail, hot-teen-pussy.com comes up in the drop-down box, or worse, hot-twinks.com
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I couldn't care less about the "Incognito"/porn mode. What I care about is proper window/tab isolation. That is, threading or forking. IE8 will have it. Chrome has it, I'm really tired of waiting for FF to catch up.
In fact, the only reason I still use FF at all is that it supports must-have extensions like adblock and flashblock. And a less necessary, but still - for me vital - extension: Foxmarks with its "Use own server" option.
Question everything
...that changes the name from "Privacy Mode" to "Porn Viewing Mode". No I'm serious. ;-)
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
"Et tu" can be either Latin or French. Latin was meant, obviously, and one would expect "Et toi" in French instead, but it's still legitimately French.
Someone needs to read more Shakespeare. Even if it was incorrect, it'd still be a paraphrased line from one of his more famous historical tragedies.
But the reference falls flat: Who is Mozilla's friend, which Mozilla is betraying for the greater good here?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Shakespeare's French was abysmal, though.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
and it's accurate to 3 decimal places!
I hope they include a way to disable this feature, or password-protect it. I don't want my kid to have anonymous unaccountable internet access, (thought I'd definitely want to use it myself).
"In case you haven't figured out, I pretty heavily in the mix of nature & nurture camp" And yet you mocked the idea of those two ideas existing together. So much for internal consistency in your ramble. For what little it counts, I believe in both "(a) "Homosexuals are born that way" and (b) "Homosexuality is a personal lifestyle choice; and who are you to question that choice" -- like you say it's a combination of nature and nurture, like pretty much EVERYTHING is -- and I don't see how these ideas are contradictory or "doublethink". If they were "competing", then they were wrongly so: they had no reason competing, they ought be complementing each other. And seemingly neither do you consider them contradictory or doublethink because you pretty much claimed the same thing when you said you favour a mix of nature & nurture.
First! ...and last? Only? Bueller?
"You're arguing for a universe with fewer waffles in it," I said. "I'm prepared to call that cowardice."
Why do people never mention the fact that Safari 3 had 'private browsing' mode way before Chrome or IE8 were even contemplated?? First it was the story about IE copying Chrome, and now the story about Mozilla copying Chrome and IE. Where's the story about Chrome ripping off Safari?!
Common sense is not so common.
What I'd *really* like to see is just the opposite - I'd like a mode where I can hide all access to my current cookies, passwords, history, etc. for a brief period if, for instance, a guest is using my computer.
I can solve this with a guest account, but a more user friendly way is to integrate this into the browser. That way I can stay logged-in to my familiar account, yet when my friend asks to google 'french fries' it doesn't autocomplete 'french whores wrapped in bacon'.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Couldn't you use a crypto one-way hash to hash the addresses of all sites you wish to block. When surfing then you'd compare the domain hash to the list of hashes to "go private" for. Sure this isn't completely secure but a whole heap better? That's how passwd works isn't it?
Yup, I know about John-The-Ripper, etc..
Uhh, so that different users of a shared computer can have everything set up the way they like when they want to use the computer?
There were stealth browsers like topark and IE8 had released privacy mode before google.. but as soon as google stepped in to the browser war, all hell breaks loose and now every browser is trying to mimic what Chrome is already offering.. Its sad to see in this process the creativity of each browser's development team will be neglected and they will be forced to update their browsers similar to Google.. Is this healthy for other browsers?
Brutus - Julius Cesar ... look it up.
It's quite an interesting and dramatic story, actually.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
It seems to me that, if you wanted to keep certain viewing habits private, you could just do all your private stuff with a separate account, and just flip back and forth between the private and public accounts. Say you're doing ordinary surfing on your public account, and you want to do something private: Ctrl-Alt-F9 (or whichever screen you're using) to go to the private account, run Firefox on that account (which would keep its stuff completely separate from the public account) and do whatever. Then Ctrl-Alt-F7 to go back to the usual account.
We do that all the time since we have houseguests from time to time, and we don't want them getting into our finances and stuff. The houseguests are often family, so we don't want to just create a sterile guest account since there is a lot that we do want to share with them (photos, etc.), Skype. So we use our "usual" account for that, and all finances and web banking goes into another account. If someone walks by while we're in the middle of something private and says, "Hey, can I check out those baby photos?", the Ctrl-Alt-F7 thing flips us back into public mode without having to log off, log back on, etc.
Make it so that MyPrivateUsername has permission to see MyPublicUsername's stuff, but the public account can't see the private stuff. I do that by making MyPrivateUsername a member of the MyPublicUsername group.
Or am I missing something? Are there special needs of porn viewers that aren't accommodated by two separate accounts?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
UNTIL the arrival of the AwesomelyShitBarâ which flatly ignores your instructions to 'clear private data' and hangs on to your browsing history for grim death.
I think you've discovered a bug. File a bug report.
The normal behaviour for both the AwesomeBar and the classic URL bar are to populate the result using the data contained in the browsing history.
If you scrub the history, both are supposed to stay empty and not auto-complete anything. (And indeed, my AwesomeBar stayed empty last time I tried scrapping my history).
The only difference behind the seen between FF2/IE/Opera-style and FF3/Chrome-style bars is the color coded presentation and the heuristic when searching the history :
- old-style does plain left-aligned substrings matching with URL and sorts them alphabetically
- new-style does keyword matching in both keywords and title and sorts them weighted by usage frequency
No history should mean nothing to populate the bar with. If your bar still contains something, then you have discovered a bug and would really help the mozilla developers (and subsequently benefit us users) (maybe some bug caused the usage statistic table not to be erased ?)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Also, using the profile manager, create a new blank profile and see if the bug is reproducible or if the AwesomeBar gets blank again after a scrubing.
Maybe also test with loading the same plugins in the blank profile.
Personally, I got similar - although exactly reverse - problems with my password database which, after updating to FF3beta, remained desperately empty even if I asked firefox to remember all my passwords.
Maybe there's a subtle bug somewhere in the new SQLite backend engine used to store all this data introduced in FF3.
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BTW: thumb ups to your sig
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]