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Fear of Porn URL Exposure Discourages Firefox 3 Upgrade
Barence writes "Mozilla's Security team has disclosed a very interesting piece of research which suggests people refused to upgrade to Firefox 3 because they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection. Mozilla's research found that the number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people's bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. 'When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed,' Firefox's principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains. 'In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object.'"
That's why I use IE.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I'm guessing "they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection" at work.
#DeleteChrome
Then making it a configurable option: Enable/disable. Or am I missing something?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? I wouldn't have wasted all this time on Slashdot, Digg, and Fark.
It would be great if there were a method to 'opt out' certain websites so that they don't come up when searching against history and bookmarks. If people go through the trouble to hid bookmarks deep into sub-sub-directories, I think they'll take the two minutes to unclick those from a long list of what is searched.
Porn mode doesn't have it's own set of bookmarks though does it? So what FF really needs is some optional password when entering porn mode that refreshes all the porn bookmarks. That's the way to go.
Seriously, that's what TOOLS>CLEAR PRIVATE DATA is for.
/.'ers are going to tell me that unless I use TrueDelete, encrypt my entire harddrive, have a backup button to overwrite everything with zeros, keep a giant electromagnet on hand, and keep my drive rigged with thermite charges that my data will never be _truly_ safe... but CLEAR HISTORY is enough for me to feel safe that my curious little sister doesn't accidentally stumble upon something I don't feel like explaining.
I'm sure some of you
So what you're saying is that you all don't clear your private data after you're done? I mean, the last version of FF was the most porn-friendly yet, letting you clear back the last hour only if you wanted.
-1, Disagree is not a valid option. Troll, Flamebait and Offtopic are not a substitute.
Users need to be reassured that private mode will not send addresses to remote sites and if it does, WHY?
Favourites made in private mode could be 'marked' as private and no suggestions made.
I used to get complaints from friends and family after erasing the browser history and temporary files to clean out junk. They don't see it like a volatile history like I do, I use mine but only if I see it. People I know use it as a primary way of getting to websites!
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
If my son ever bothered to look under folder Dads/Homework/Math he might learn a few things. :-)
*quickly goes off to tweak a few things*
History Block fixes this problem very nicely. It let's you setup a block list of urls that should not appear in the history.
When I was in tech support 10 years ago, "How do I get rid of things in the drop-down?" was a common Netscape support question.
Some of them were very cool and didn't say why they wanted to get rid of it. Some said "I accidently hit this link". I think I may have had one or two guys who were honest about it during my entire time there.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's the ranking of the question "How do I get rid of the Awsomebar" on various forums?
Pretty high, I bet.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It is configurable, albeit not through the options dialog. In about:config browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 1 or 0 1 for firefox 2 style, 0 for no search browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped = true That will turn it off, if it really bothers you
And then start the sleazy one from the command line only Alternatively, don't be surfin porn at work!
Just set up a separate user for pr0n. Then you can have an entirely separate set of bookmarks.
From http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disabling_autocomplete_-_Firefox To prevent entries from History or bookmarked items from appearing but show those that you have specifically typed into the Location Bar (url bar), use about:config to toggle browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped to true. To completely disable the Location Bar autocomplete function in Firefox 3, modify the preference browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 (zero). [1]
Just remove the feature if you don't like it.
This is what multiple profiles is for. I use it at home so if I'm doing, uh, "research", the kids don't see it in the awesome bar when I'm helping with homework or whatever. You can always start a new profile and then delete it if you need to.
Big surprise; my friends visits porntube.com too...
Use different browsers for different purposes.
For example, use Google Chrome for your porn browsing, and then Firefox for your legit browsing.
In other words... Don't cross the streams!!
I just realized.
Surely the people searching for porn using your web browser will be happy to see suggestions for porn you already have?
Thanks dad!
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
Translation: People who typed "en." to bring up the last few times they'd visited en.wikipedia.org, "fi" to bring up the last few times they'd visited "finance.google.com", or "fa" for either "fark.com" or "failblog.org", were sick and tired of having to deal with "English, ASCII, and Unicode", "How to manage a thousand Files of data", and "The Awfulbar is a Failure because it mixes URLs, "TITLE" fields in bookmarks and TITLE headers all into one giant mishmash of UI hell."
It's got nothing to do with pr0n, it's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
What's the first thing experienced Windows users do when they sit down in front of a new machine? They turn off the "Disable infrequently-used menu options" option in the Start Menu, and again in all of the MS Office apps.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox. Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
Pics, or it didn't happen
One could infer that the presence of that elective addon and the fact it has hashes defined means the person has stuff to hide. In some legal situations, that would be sufficient, but generally the worry that is supposed to address is friends and family...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Use FF for everything but pr0n, then when you want to go see nekkid people, fire up opera or camino or safari or whatever.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
there's porn on the internet?!
The problem is that Clear Private Data does not work.
I remember when I first upgraded to FF3, and was shocked to find that when I "cleared private data" and then clicked on the URL drop-down there were still all the web sites I had visited.
The "Awesome bar" does not get cleared out!
I had to install some plug-in to restore that functionality.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
All those nice bits of user-interface candy are nice to have. So I keep two browsers on my system (an iMac).
Safari is on the launch bar and in the usual place and is the "main" browser. Firefox.app is in an unusual place (so that it will not get launched by mistake) and is used only for porn. Also, any porn I save from the internet goes onto a disk image that is normally left unmounted. I suppose I could encrypt that, but can't really be bothered.
So far (~5 years) this approach has worked very well.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox. Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
That's not true at all... at least for me personally. I can say for certain that in Google Chrome, I only ever type in en to get to wikipedia, g to get to gmail, s to get to slashdot, fa for fark, fai for failblog, fac for facebook, etc. I find this feature highly useful, and then when I click "New Tab," I find the information presented there interesting. In Chrome, there are little boxes that have previews of the sites you frequent most, and I am finding that those rankings change place occasionally. I don't use that page to determine what site to visit, but it's interesting to me to see the rankings change month-to-month.
To be fair, even having an address bar where you see and type in URLs is totally against the way the web was designed and isn't very usable. I should be able to type 'wikipedia red dwarf' to get to that Red Dwarf page on wikipedia, not remember en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf.
Too bad I can't mod tags. +1 nailedit
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Everyone knows that you better use a different user profile with pornzilla installed into it for that.
you can use the profile manger to make a "special" (/cough pron) profile then switch to that for your "special" browsing needs then swtich back to you wife/boss/kid ..etc safe profile when you are ummm done..... YOU SICK BASTARD =p
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
actually, when I use the location bar, en brings up en.wikipedia as the first few entries, while I am sure that I have several bookmarks in my few thousand that have "en" within them.
The location bar seems to heavily weight sites that have been visited in the "recent" past, and also heavily weights items in the list that are selected, as opposed to those that are routinely ignored.
I love it and hope that the vocal minority (okay, I have no proof it's a minority) don't have it pulled in the future.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Normally, I would agree that changing around menus and second-guessing the user mostly leads to annoyance and little else.
However, when it comes to Firefox' location bar, I just don't see the problem. In order to get rid of the "faulty hits", you just keep typing what you were already typing, for a few more characters. I don't find that very annoying, and I love being able to find stuff without remembering anything specific about the URL and just something about it, or the page.
That said, I would love some more configuration options, such as whether to weigh time-since-last-visit, frequency of visit, keywords, or whatever the most.
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
People who typed "en." to bring up the last few times they'd visited en.wikipedia.org, "fi" to bring up the last few times they'd visited "finance.google.com", or "fa" for either "fark.com" or "failblog.org", ... Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
If the location bar only scanned URL strings, you'd still have the problem of changing menus. Whenever you visit a site beginning with the same text as a previously visited site, the suggestion menu would change.
Well I'm an experienced computer user (Mac user mostly), and I love the way the firefox bar works.
I now never look through my bookmarks folders, I just start typing words I know are in there, and find them ASAP.
Maybe that's because I'm used to similar cool search functionality in Spotlight and every other Mac app that ties into it seamlessly.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Tag all porn bookmarks as "xxx Bookmark Name" instead of "Bookmark Name". ("XXX" can literally be "XXX"!)
Write a plugin that only shows those bookmarks in the awesome bar if you type in XXX first.
Also restrict the history results in the awesome bar to only show hits from a given domain if it is NOT in an xxx-tagged bookmark.
You get to hide your bookmarks and history from anyone who isn't specifically looking for it.
You get to use the awesome bar to access your stuff.
It's not about hiding your shit well, it's about making sure it doesn't pop up automagically.
The only other solution is to move onto having profiles for browsers.
Open FF, use the net.
Want your bookmarks and history and cool stuff?
Log in to Firefox instead of using the open account.
Use a URL shortening service to create URLs to point to your favorite websites you don't want others to see, and bookmark the shortened version.
Then, give the bookmark name itself something non-incriminating. Like just a set of initials for the website name.
These two methods will prevent anything incriminating from your bookmarks showing up when someone starts typing something in the address bar.
This won't help for any pages in your history, but fortunately that parts easy. Judicious use of "Clear Private Data" will take care of that.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
1. Maybe you don't want your wife....
Obviously, this scenario doesn't apply to Slashdot readers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox.
The Awesomebar is quite a different thing then Office menus. Office changes stuff around that used to be static and turns finding a menu entry into a hide&seek game. The Awesomebar one the other side just keeps track of your history and lets you search it. Sure, it moves things around to, but thats because searching the history naturally will give different results when the history changes. Nothing wrong with that. If you want it static use good old bookmarks and assign keywords to them, the Awesomebar doesn't stop you from using these features.
It just takes retraining. Retraining does not necessarily make it a bad UI. If I want wikipedia, I type "wiki" instead of "en.". There have been a couple times (admittedly a small minority of times) where I wanted to go to a page in my history, couldn't remember the URL whatsoever, and just started typing random words I thought might have been in the title bar and had the page come up in the FF3 "awesomebar".
It's really not the same as the Windows/Office variable menus because they specifically change muscle-memory-based click orders and hotkeys, but there really is no strong argument for click orders and hot keys in the url bar. That's what Bookmarks are for.
As a matter of fact, I *never* use the dropdown. It's much faster to just keep on typing in what I started to type than to look at the dropdown and decide what I meant to type and select it. Still I like the dropdown since very rarely I might not know the exact URL and then the list comes in handy. So I really like the "everything" style here.
There are clever ideas badly implemented and better implemented. Context sensitive menus aren't always bad.
That's funny, I type "wik" to get to wikipedia. I feel like I've transcended normal geekery to the point that I no longer care to know details like what the path and arguments are to a phpbb post. Or maybe I've gotten used to Firefox. It generally gets me what I want, better than IE at least.
Examples:
IE gets me to my Google stock portfolio when I type "goo" -- as long as I'm careful to not visit too many google sites. Luckily, whatever the parameters are (and, like I said, I'm such an advanced human being that I feel I no longer need to) are toward the top of Google's suite alphabetically. In Firefox, I type "port" and don't worry about what other google sites I use.
If I've visited a forum, say, to find the torque specs for a 97 Nissan Sentra flywheel, and I remember the name of the forum, and haven't viewed more than a couple other posts on that forum, IE will get me there reasonably fast. In Firefox, I can type "sentra torque" and it'll find the post for me based on the title.
What I don't like is that, by default, Firefox keeps your history forever. When I typed "fac" to go to Facebook, the first entry, until I finally cleaned my history, was facesloaded.com, since I was duped (I didn't say I regretted it) in to clicking on a link on IRC. Finding a balance between keeping my history around long enough and not regretting visiting a certain site because it gets in the way of my -- I guess it's called the Awesome Bar? -- is something I haven't quite nailed yet. In any case, I almost never use bookmarks anymore.
Whale
Hey, I like the awfulbar -- but I think I may have its only solid use case. When bored, I typically go through the alphabet with the location bar to find some site which I've visited before, but is not in my usual rotation, to see if there is something interesting and new posted there.
With the awfulbar, I get a much greater cross-section of weirdness with each letter. Just the letter C, for instance, could have Camera-related sites, Cinemark, and for no reason at all the Washington Post.
Two-letter combinations are even better. "GH" gives me Ghostbusters, and a random Mac vs Linux thread. "EW" gives me BBC News and a review of Ponyo. The wonders never cease.
SHOULD a major interface element behave in a random and bizarre fashion? Well, probably not.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Actually I disagree with you, because this is less about changing around menu options as it is about search.
Not a day goes by where I don't use Google to search for SOMETHING. Having to navigate through a large directory tree of every website meticulously filed, but being unable to SEARCH through it, would be unbearable. Similarly, sometimes you just want to find something in your history or bookmarks but can't remember where it is, or maybe you have so many items that it's simply easier to search for it.
Perhaps your examples are valid in some cases, but it's important to realize how results are sorted. They use a mixture of frequency and recency... so if "fi" doesn't pop up Google Finance the first time, if you do it a few times it will likely quickly rise to the top. The Awesome Bar "learns" in this way. That's why it's Awesome.
I put in finance.google.com and went there, then checked the results for "fi". It did pop up near the bottom of the list. After navigating there again and checking "fi" again, it jumped straight to the top that time.
That said I use Chrome, which has a very similar system (I think it prefers bookmarks and actually typed urls over page history though) that no-one seems to complain about. Indeed Chrome actually has a more annoying flaw, in that sometimes the history "forgets" the titles of random pages you visited, which can make searching for the title of a page impossible and browsing for it difficult unless you happen to remember the url.
As for the people who won't upgrade, it is possible they dislike the Awesome Bar for whatever reason (it's not really important to understand why) but I can definitely see at least some of them not wanting others who use the computer or are watching them to stumble on past browser history or bookmarks. Even though probably many Slashdotters have their own computer(s) that no-one else uses, I understand many households share a single computer.
Of course if you do browsing you don't want anyone else to know about that's what Private Browsing mode is for, coincidentally also introduced in 3.5 along with the Awesome Bar completion toggle.
post.parent.informative user set integer 5
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First thing I did was set browser.urlbar.matchBehavior or browser.urlbar.default.behavior or whatever it was at the time to try to only search URLs, but then it didn't ignore common prefixes like www.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461483
Open source software has traditionally had overly aggressive command completion. Developers tend to be keyboard-oriented but not strong typists, while most end-users are now mouse-oriented.
A classic example is Open Office's word completion. It assumes that the user is looking at the screen and interacting with the program from keystroke to keystroke as they type.
If Firefox completely removed command completion and just kept the feature that feeds non-URLs into Google, most users would probably be happier.
Translation: People who typed "en." to bring up the last few times they'd visited en.wikipedia.org, "fi" to bring up the last few times they'd visited "finance.google.com", or "fa" for either "fark.com" or "failblog.org", were sick and tired of having to deal with "English, ASCII, and Unicode"
I really don't understand this problem. The first time I typed in "en" to get to wikipedia, sure a ton of other stuff -- in my case all of it being other urls I'd visited that started with en -- comes up, but then I select the one I want, and from then on Firefox immediately goes to the one I wanted.
So basically, restricting the search to urls like you want doesn't solve this "problem" unless you visit very few urls to begin with, and since the software learns what you want it isn't a problem after the first click anyawy. What, you only use url abbreviations once ever, but want firefox to still be able to predict what you wanted?
However if what I wanted was my "English, ASCII, and Unicode" from my bookmarks, then I would have clicked that, and Firefox would have learned that is what I want. Sounds useful for people who work that way.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows
It's not moving menu items around. The menu in question is a dynamic history with auto-complete. How could it not change unless you never did anything? And since one of the changes is to figure out what you meant when you type something, how is this a bad thing? What, you want an unsorted undynamic history pulldown? How does that make any sense?
The enemies of Democracy are
'When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn't really want to have displayed,' Firefox's principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains. 'In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object.'
How about a special edition of Firefox? Firefox Privacy Edition or some such.
Prebuilt with Ghostery, Flashblock, NoScript and CookieSafe (or the best-of-breed equivalents). Each of those defaulted to max security. And with history turned off, assistive * turned off, surreptitous surveillance mode turned off, etc.
Maybe call it "Firefox For The Clueful".
It's not about fearing surveillance -- it's about recognizing that dozens of two-bit wankers have figured out how to dupe some business weenie at every corporation to stick a tracker on their website in exchange for a pretty traffic chart. Surveillance is pervasive. Firefox used to be the weapon of choice for privacy -- now it is a starting point which, with an hour or two of work, can become a privacy-enabled browser.
If such a large number of your users are saying they want a proper privacy enhanced experience, and assuming you want to extend your reach (I dig it's Open Source, and you can do whatever you want to do, and I applaud that) -- if you want that, it might make sense to make a privacy-enhanced version of Firefox. Surely Microsoft and Apple aren't going to give up their precious surveillance. It is an opportunity to totally own the clueful user demographic.
Just a thought.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Firefox 3's URL, such as fear, will be upgraded to prevent the exposure of child pornography.
I don't want to bookmark those sites , and those URLs are hard to remember! Sometimes completing against history is the fastest option.
"Was it one girl and two cups? Three girls and one cup? Two and a half girls and one and a half cups? I can't remember!"
Have you ever actually USED the bar? I don't know what you're doing with it, but for me it puts on the top of the list the things that I most often go to when typing those letters, not whatever random things happen to be in the history like you seem to be claiming. If I type in "game," I ALWAYS get gametrailers.com at the top of the list. If I type in "net," I ALWAYS get nethack.wikia.com at the top. I can only assume it's because those are the sites that I generally go to when I type in those words.
Maybe for the first day or so it won't know what you want, but for all the time I can remember using it it's been well trained and actually very helpful.
in a meta-/. way, I love the insightful mod to the AC.
It is as if someone thought, "hmm that is a good point- Why read and discuss geek news when I could be jacking off."
There is nothing in the report that says specifically people are hiding pr0n.
I bury URLs that allow me to sign into web sites (such as slashdot and imageshack). I'm also a massive organization freak. Before I moved to a tag-based system (delicious), my bookmark directory structure was 10-levels deep.
I personally like the new awesome bar. Some people hate it and I understand that. They really should make it an option, either in the preferences or within the bookmark.
We don't live in Shouldland.
Firefox'es success is mainly tied to their focus on filling end user needs, listening to end users for suggestions instead of replying .
If this is a problem enough to make people stay on old version, it should be fixed somehow instead of blogging or joking about it. Think like they are your customers while you don't actually sell a product and treat them same way.
Do you know how Cisco etc. survived in darkest days of dotcom crash? Who needed the best routers and servers to serve their customers?
Also, it's way better and your creaky old brain is too ossified to change its neural pathways on any non-trivial scale. Yeah, that's right, it's my lawn now. GTFOff it.
Like that is intutive. Most users don't even know "about:config." Heck, I even forget the syntax.
This is not a user friendly solution.
It's got everything to do with the fact that some people want a URL bar to act as a Bar with URLs, and the Firefox Design Team wants the "Location" bar to deal with "everything you ever visited, ever, with ever-changing menus".
Amen, brother.
I didn't install Firefox 3 until there was a plugin to kill the Awesomebar. It really was a dealbreaker for me.
I hate UIs that try to be helpful but end up distracting or otherwise messing up a clean interface.
The old Google autocomplete was a great example of this - it'd type directly into the search bar while you typed in your search term, which means that if you typoed and needed to delete the last key entered, you'd delete the autocomplete instead, which broke, you know, typing. It was also distracting seeing text appear where you're typing, not only because it was constantly flashing words before your eyes, but also because if you're a touch typist you use the text up there to make sure you haven't typoed, and seeing an 'f' appear on the screen when you're about to type an 'm' triggers that correction reflex.
The current design is much better, with the dropdown box at least off to the side while you type in your search term.
When you bookmark a page, would it be real hard to have a checkbox to allow/disallow that particular bookmark from being displayed in the awesome bar when typing things in? I know it pulls pages from history as well, so maybe have an option to turn just history off? Seems like there's about 10 different ways to go about this, and still have your porn...
There is no "browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped". At least not in Firefox 3.5.2...
Turns out it's got something to do with the "browser.urlbar.default.behavior" entry, which consists of:
1: history
2: bookmarked
4: match tag
8: match title
16: match URL
32: match typed
So to kill the annoying bookmark/tag/title matching, set it to 1+8+16+32 = 49
I've also been told you can modify "places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus", but every time I do that Firefox changes it back.
So much for user friendliness...
>> Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox. Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
This is different. You can't select a menu item that isn't there; but you can always get to a url by typing it fully.
Firefox can use all the data it wants for the bar but it must be more helpful than the obvious URL-only search. Otherwise, Darwin Osbourne will bite its head off like a bat.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
The most simple solution would be to use "Porn Mode".
Enable private browsing, use search engines to find your fetish, never book mark anything, and close the browser when you're done. No history, no cookies, don't even have to clean up (well, anything digital that is...heh).
If you have so many porn urls that you frequent so often that you can't remember all of them, then you have a larger problem than someone finding your bookmarks. I do like the tinyurl workaround someone mentioned above.
Really, no user should be sharing the same user account so profiles will be separate anyway, but this is targeted at the non tech savvy individuals that won't be reading slashdot. the same users never update anything else either.
Er... make that 1+16+32 = 49.
Or under 3.5, go to Tools > Options... Privacy Tab
Location Bar drop down and select Nothing. Or some other selection.
because when a large list of sites have been created, there is noticeable lag on my netbook when I type in a URL.
Go to the preferences dialog, go to "Privacy" tab. There's an option which allows you to pick what kinds of data the Location Bar should look through.
Select "nothing" and it won't look through either your history or your bookmarks.
And the reason Microsoft had to come up with the Ribbon - because the vast majority of users (ie, the less computer savvy) never saw all the options on the menus, and so never knew the software could do so much.
I'm sure that if you fire up about:config you might be able to tweak this behaviour but really by default it should be disabled, or at least disabled if history is set to 0. It's a monumental oversight to leave it the way it is and I hope it is fixed.
But according to my statistics, Firefox 3 is the most used browser. If this story is true, then how many more would switch?
My web domain.
Technically, it is configurable (about:config has a property that disables the bookmark searching), just not with a neat radio button.
Sure. In fact, I've done this myself and it wasn't that hard.
It's still annoying as hell that they made a totally major UI change... and they didn't also make an easy way to turn it off along with it.
Tweet, tweet.
Porn virtual machine
Everyone knows I look at porn, so there would be no surprises.
Geez, hasn't everyone heard about Stealther (pr0n mode extension for Firefox) at this point?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 Firefox 2 location bar, firefox 3 everything else. Its that simple.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
I had a near disaster the other day when Firefox 3 would not clear my history or private data! I had to go to "recently visited" under the bookmarks preferences and manually delete links 10 at a time. I still not sure if the links are stored somewhere.....looks like it's back to magazines!
Daniel
http://wizkidsound.com
Not necessarily. Most accessed links usually come first.
The title search is useful when you want to find a page about a some subject which you visited but not bookmarked. Not everyone keep a lot of bookmarks and not every page is as easy to find as a google search. Sometimes might not even know you will need to browse the same site again.
It is a clever good idea which some people might complain about just because they might not need it most of the time. Indeed, the feature should be configurable, for those who just want to turn it off.
Private browsing and the ability to erase data about specific sites were implemented in 3.5. They could just skip 3 and go for 3.5.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
What are you people thinking? This is the greatest invention ever to come to the web! Worried about others finding your porn? Hell, this allows ME to find porn i forgot to bookmark because i was too drunk!
Is this about an earlier version of Firefox? I use version 3.5 and under Options->Privacy->Location "When using the location bar suggest:" with 3 options. I picked the nothing option. What am I missing? Is this article about why they put in the option to suggest 'nothing' in version 3.5?
I like the awesome bar.
I've always hidden my porn deep on shared computers. One such location was c:\program files\common files\lightscribe\software\lightscribe\dbm\ , with file names as numbers. Back on Windows 98 I would rename these folders in DOS with characters windows didn't recognize such as alt+194. I don't think it mattered what character you used to rename it to be able to view the files, but it worked well enough to hide tranny porn from my parents.
Firefox must not crash on you that often. You also must not open that many tabs. I'd be pissed as hell if I lost the 60+ tabs I have open.
It's long been my contention that TWO bookmark systems are needed - one that is encrypted/hidden etc. etc. and the other for 'family' use. The usually sensible crowd at Mozilla truly missed the boat on this one (and who amongst us does not have our favourite little places on the internet where we should not be seen??!!
*** Don't be dull.***
I've had this one when fixing up a (private) client's PC. I hit the web to download some driver/antivirus/whatever files and the first "suggested" link from his history in the dropdown was "analtaboo.com"
There was a brief pause, and then he asked "can you clear those off there. I'll pay you an extra ten bucks if you can show ME how to clear/hide them from my wife".
I use IE and chrome in private mode for such purpose.
But it doesn't work. It doesn't only match what I typed. It also matches titles of pages. So why the fuck does facebook come up before fox news when I type in "fox"? How the fuck is that "improvement". If I want to keep up on the right wing agenda, facebook isn't what I want.
Used Firefox on this XP machine for years, accepting all the upgrades and now Firefox crashes hard when started. Tried reinstalling, removing toolbar, etc, but the goggles, zey do nothing...
I suppose I could revert to 3.0, but meh -I just installed Chrome instead.
-I'm just sayin'
when his girlfriend types in www and the first site to popup was www.dumpstersluts.com and yes that really happened.
if you have to hide your activities, something is wrong.
Yeah, then all someone needs to do is check the list of "URLs I don't want people to know about"). Real great.
I love the Awesome Bar! Chrome's equivalent doesn't come close. Seriously, I get urges to get back on Firefox because I miss the Awesome Bar so much.
It's pretty easy to restrict Awesome Bar searches to just bookmarks, history, page titles, or URLs. Granted, that's not a very discoverable feature. But I hardly use it, the default behavior works great for me.
People don;t want to disable the location bar autocomplete. They want to revert it back to ff2.0 behavior.
So I use opera regularly, but I have chrome and firefox for certain things too. I know I know, godless heathen.
So I look at my drop down menu for the address bar. yahoo, google, google scholar, the uni I work at, a company I did a contract for, amazon. Rather dull. Oh, except for all of the things I typed wrong. Typed www.slahsdot.org - it's in there, might not be a huge problem since it is clearly spelled wrong. What about the more amiguous .net vs .com .ca, etc? Or my WoW guild when the website first went up the page was a /dkp/index.htm /dkp/ just gave an error and /dkp/index.html gave an error. Think I can remember which of those is correct? How about roger.com, rogers.com, rogers.ca? In this case IIRC they're all valid, but not necessarily the one I want.
Understandably people don't want their browsing history necessarily displayed when anyone goes to use their computer. But sometimes I don't want to see my own browsing history when it doesn't work.
Yes, the recently visited list is stored in a .xml file which I on occasion have to edit when I fail to type something in correclty.
I think the article is right on the marker.
Did you know, one can copy the entire Firefox profile from one PC to another and from the new PC point the profile to this copied one and you have all the shortcuts, history, everything copied.
As an domain admin I can know a lot about my users by doing this, if I wanted to. I can log into any sites they have passwords save as for those are in my Firefox now too. (I should state now that I don't actually do this, other than with my own test profiles on multiple PCs to make a point.)
firefox.exe -profilemanager
So the solution? Be friends with TrueCrypt and integrate this into Firefox. If a user wants to, they can optionally convert their profile into a secure one. Then when they launch Firefox, they either can open the secure profile (valid truecrypt pwd) or the default profile (anything but the valid pwd.) The profile directory becomes a truecrypt volume mounted by firefox, but ideally without mapping a drive letter. Perhaps a junction point?
That's why i stumble, make bookmarks, find lots of interesting things and then clear the cache and sign out when your done
Two words, HistoryBlock extension.
And for another horrible decision, consider how they handle keywords.
The Keyword functionality is a great idea in Firefox, but it feels like the devs hate it - they hide it away in the UI, it's underfeatured, and it doesn't work with Awful Bar. If I type "wp Sasquatch" to get to the wikipedia page for Sasquatch, that doesn't get saved in the history - and the Great Bar doesn't realize that what you're typing may be using a keyword. So when I again type "wp Sasq", odds are I just get no results at all from the Bar. Instead, Firefox locks up for a few seconds while churning away finding irrelevant pages I haven't been to in months.
I saw quite a few complaints about this behavior early on. The response was essentially that's tough, take it or leave it. Apparently a number of users left it.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Fortunately, Firefox still supports the multiple users Profile that exisited ever since the first mozilla,
and it easy to read the other profile's bookmarks page if you know where it is.
1+8+16+32 != 49
I stopped using Gmail because it was scanning e-mails and targeting ads based on e-mail contents. It was creepy because I only used that account to communicate with one business client. After a while I noticed there were ads lining the page about a subject we just discussed. I ignored it the first time but then it kept happening so I dropped the account. There's aggressive advertising and then there's disturbing advertising. I can't see a lot of people thanking companies for scanning their personal information just to shove ads down their throats.
Well, de gustibus non est disputandum. The Awfulbar isn't an advantage if I'm navigating to, e.g., slashdot.org, or en.wikipedia.org, or nytimes.com. It is an advantage if I am going, say, here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica. I can type "dem" in the Awfulbar, and it will find it. If I can't remember the URL, I can also search by title, e.g., "economist blog politics". What's really super-great is Chrome's Heinousbar, er, Omnibar, which searches one's history, bookmarks, and Google. I imagine that, for you, that's even worse. Luckily, the world is large enough that we can both use software which works the way we want it to.
under the 401K statements, I assume
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Who uses layers of bookmark folders? Use layers of virtual machines instead.
There *is* an easy button.
In version 3.5.2
Tools -> Options -> Privacy ... opens a dialog. Near the bottom is
Location Bar
When using the location, suggest: [Drop down box]
The options are:
Nothing
History
Bookmarks
History and Bookmarks
Set it to 'Nothing', and you're done.
Just use firefox's private browsing feature. History won't be kept for the session
you are using it in. When you are done with your business, revert
back to normal mode and it will be as if you never visited the sites.
Of course this doesn't remove them from you DNS cache, but for most people
privacy at the browser is sufficient. You can always
set your machine (at work or whatever) to use a service like
opendns. That is, if you are stupid or desperate enough to look at
porn at work.
Sadly, the browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped no longer works in Firefox 3.5. There is more information here. Specifically see the part on browser.urlbar.default.behavior. I currently have mine set to 32 to match the old "matchonlytyped" behaviour.
I think it also weights pages based on how they were visited: URLs you type seem to be strongly favoured over pages you visited by clicking a link.
Personally I can get to Wiki just by typing "en" – usually followed by hitting the down arrow, shift-ctrl-left to highlight the selected article's title, and then typing the name of what I'm looking for.
In fact most of the web pages I routinely visit come up as the top result for only one letter: "m" for google maps, "n" for google news, "w" for wired, "s" for slashdot, "c" for my slashdot comments page. The only site I really have to type much for is to actually do a google search... and I could actually solve that by typing "q=" instead of starting by typing "google.com". I type fast enough that it doesn't really matter, though.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I've been browsing the web practically since there was one, and I rather like that I can type in a substring of the title of a page I visited yesterday but didn't think to bookmark or save the exact URL somewhere. I'm a human, it's not my job to remember URLs. Domain names sure, but URLs are the computer's job.
Everyone that I've heard complain about the awesomebar hates it because they only want URL auto-complete and are confused that it does more than they were expecting or are used to.
So? If it crashes when you're visiting sites you don't want others finding out about, just restart it and finish your browsing session, then take whatever precautions (clearing history or whatever) you feel necessary before closing it normally. What's the big deal?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I use a mattress folder for all of my links to porn. Under the mattress. Get it. cough. But in all seriousness, the "see your bookmarks while you type in the URL field" functionality annoys me only because it seems to be sucking down memory like there is no tomorrow going through the list. I have thousands of bookmarks. Most of them are probably to specific pages in a documentation site on my NAS at home. What? I'm old. Computers are here to make up for my loss of memory! Anyway, the whole thing doesn't really get to me much. I see it as something they put in because the majority of people probably like it. What does bother me to the point of anger is the "+" sign to open a new tab and no "X" on the first tab. If I wanted IE dysfunctionality I would still use the OS it works on. If anyone knows how to disable this new "feature" please let me know. I'm too lazy to move to chrome.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Agreed: This is my main use for it as well.
The intended history-matching is a distant second, and I prefer searching in the history window anyway. (For one thing, it lets me see and sort by date visited.)
This "feature" is also responsible for freezing the entire browser whenever I open a new tab and start typing in the URL bar. It queries a friggin sqlite database to pull up all the previously visited urls I could mean to visit. I have to vacuum a database to make my browser usable.
cd
for i in */*.sqlite;
do
sqlite3 $i VACUUM;
done;
i fail at preview. line one should read "cd $FF_HOME"
The research was conducted by going through the huge pile of material that was collected from client computers to Mozilla servers...
I'm running FF 3.5.2. I can go into the security settings, and set it so the location bar shows nothing as I type. It's not like you can't turn that setting off if you have something to hide.
Trust issues much? I haven't used a non-shared password on a home computer since I left a dorm. My wife knows every password I have, and so do some trusted friends.
Trust, sure - but sharing a user account, to me, is kind of like sharing a toothbrush... I can do it, it won't freak me out or anything, but I don't really want to...
Bow-ties are cool.
Exposing porn is just one part of the problem. Searching through bookmarks is just a broken approach for the location bar. It's exactly the sort of "helpful nuisance" that we hate when it comes from Microsoft.
The location bar should behave sensibly. Bringing up a drop-down box with a history of items previously typed into that textfield that begin with the same characters you've typed is sensible; that behavior can be replicated all throughout the UI and it will work, intuitively.
Searching through bookmarks, browsing history, and in the MIDDLE of words is odd, unpredictable, and unintuitive behavior. It sounds neat at first; just the sort of thing a Marketing droid would love. But it's broken. It changes in unpredictable ways. It is an exception; no other text field would ever behave the same way.
Plus, it was crammed down our throats. The option to turn it off in the 3.0 beta was removed. People had to resort to add-ons to disable it. Since then, they've at least added more options to reduce its presence, but they're still buried in the about:config settings, not in the Option menu. The Awesomebar should have been an optional add-on from the very beginning. That's how many of the new features should be handled.
The behaviour could easily be changed so it is controlled from a checkbox or intelligently inferred by looking at the privacy settings such as the remember browser history settings. The current behaviour is completely at odds with privacy.
Phoenix which evolved into Firefox 1.0 was a very slick cross platform browser with a modern rendering engine, performant javascript engine (by that time) and was adhering for standards compliance (not so important from the POV of an end user, but interesting for developers).
Firefox 2 brought the addon ecosystem into life. Technologicaly the infrastructure for addons was there since 1.0 but it really started to benefit the user with version 2.0 and onwards.
Firefox 3.0 has IMHO failed to deliver a real benefit to the user. The old slick browser has gone. There were performance improvements implemented under the hood but the UI really suffered and became really sticky (even without addons installed). Typing in locations sucks with the awesombar (just to name one of the performance hits).
Maybe this is the reason why many tech savy people keep the fingers away from FF3?
BTW: i have started to evaluate other browsers, arora (GTK/webkit) or and Epiphany (GTK/Gecko) are nice alternatives but lacking addons.
Cheers,
-S
I think you'd be pissed as hell if the next person who used your computer, or looked over your shoulder discovered what sites you were on. I'm not saying the tab restoration behaviour shouldn't exist but the current implementation is completely at odds with privacy settings the user may well have set. There should either be a check box or the value should be inferred from looking at the other privacy settings. For example if the user has set they don't want their browser history recorded, or has chosen to clear settings at shutdown, then they should not be shown what they were last looking at when the browser restarts.
Unfortunately, it's such a clever bad idea that it'll never go away.
Worse--it's spreading! Safari 4 has this "feature." You could disable it in Safari 4 Beta but not in the final version, which is why I'll stick with 4 Beta on all of my Macs for as long as possible. I hate it, hate it, HATE IT. Safari 3 did an AWESOME job of weighing which addresses to show first based on frequency and recentness of last visits and if it's a bookmark. So if I start typing 'sla' I see the Slashdot home page followed by my user page and a couple others, followed by a million article and comment pages I went to once and never need to go to again.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You are WRONG!
Do you people even look at what you are suggesting?
Right from the description:
Note that the underlying autocomplete algorithm is the Firefox 3 algorithm, not the Firefox 2 algorithm. oldbar only affects the presentation of the results."
Yes, you need FF 3.5 to make it work. But Private Browsing mode fixes the "pr0nsome bar" issue.
Even better, it provides a "wife key" - it goes back to your previous session when you hit it again, so it doesn't have a suspiciously empy window or naked desktop.
I would, truth be told, prefer that I had a wife who also enjoyed porn and didn't mind my viewing it. But I'd also prefer a wife who actually put out more than once a year on average (hence the use of porn to reduce distractions at work and improve my general mood.)
what about incognito browsing?
I've installed the beta of Weave across all my Firefox installations, including at work. I've noticed a couple of 'interesting' items of history coming up in the awesome bar, having synced with my home PC... Might need to tweak my Weave settings.
I have to laugh at the echoes of Victorianism here. It's one step better than maintaining the public pretence that we don't have genitals, but somehow it all seems rather childish. Then again, if a guy has gone trawling to discover just how bad it can get, I don't think, if I were that guy, that I'd want the brain-sear popping up at random in my Awesome Bar.
Ten years ago I spend a couple of hours on rotten.com. Without seeing much of anything, I got enough brain-sear to inoculate me for the rest of my life. I'm a pussy. I like activities where I can return to normal when the activity is done.
Yesterday, I read this about an art installation.
An installation with a big impact
For art's sake, it would be fun to equip a Roomba with a webcam broadcasting in real time everything it finds under your bed on an open wifi channel.
What people sometimes get confused about is that the maintenance of privacy is not necessarily the primary thing. We judge people severely on their ability to maintain and navigate these real (or sometimes artificial) privacy gradients.
If a person can't keep their sex life out of casual conversation in a coffee shop, are you going to whisper to them in the dark of night who the KGB most recently picked up?
Maybe Clinton got himself into so much real hot water because he was afraid to install his porn loader in the white house.
If I were the world's most powerful man with only Hillary and the palm sisters to choose between, I'd be signing up for Botox injection directly into the perineum.
The location bar seems to heavily weight sites that have been visited in the "recent" past, and also heavily weights items in the list that are selected, as opposed to those that are routily ignored.
*nods* Additionally, it weights results by the *characters that are typed* to access a page in the AwesomeBar.
In my case:
"blogs." to reach blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/
"sor" to reach blogs.msdn.com/michcap/
...the first entry, until I finally cleaned my history, was facesloaded.com...
You *do* know that you can highlight an entry in The Bar with the keyboard and press the Delete key on your keyboard to remove it from the current (and all future) searches? [This is not to say that re-visiting that site will not put it back in The Bar, though.]
That would be true if it wasn't for the fact that the awesome bar learns where you usually go, and the results you pick usually are bumped to the top of the list. That means that when you type "en." the first time, you may not have Wikipedia as the first result, but after 3 or 4 times, if you use it the most, it will be for sure. And if it is not the first result it is because you use another of the results triggered by "en." more, which sounds about right.
In my particular case, the awesome bar is the answer to something I have been wishing for since almost starting to use web browsers, which is that my browser is able to autocomplete using my bookmarks when I type an URL. It means that I can erase my history for privacy for privacy or whatever other reason I may have, and Firefox will still autocomplete the sites I use the most. As I *hate* with a passion hunting for a bookmark to click through the bookmarks menu, and I am several orders of magnitude faster typing the first 3 letters of any of my frequent sites than in searching for the bookmark in the menu, this is the single thing that has enhanced my browsing experience the most in ages.
You can also tag your bookmarks and use that to search for them with awesome bar, which makes it much easier to find a site when you have it bookmarked but you don't use it as much if you took the whole 30 seconds it takes to tag it properly when you created it.
BTW, and before someone feels the urge to point out how I may not be an "experienced user" as the OP mentioned, I have worked for a few years as a Linux/Solaris sysadmin and an Oracle DBA; my main OS is Kubuntu; I have a triple boot system with Kubuntu, XP (for games) and 7 (hey, RC was free); and have my own web/file/network services personal server at home. I do not think being more or less experienced has anything to do with this. What I feel this is is a case of uneasiness with something radically changed, which has meant that myriads of people haven't even given a change to the awesome bar. It may really not fit your browsing style, but the awesome bar really has its merits.
In FF, you can keep typing 'sla' and selecting the same page, and FF will get the hint and start sticking that page that you visit most often at the top of the list.
*shrug* /me *really* hopes that the Mozilla folks get enough fan-mail so's that they don't remove The Bar. :D
to the cretins who designed the widely-called "AwfulBar" feature, shows how little thought they give to privacy and security in MozillaLand these days. If the browser has such a glaring INTENTIONAL privacy failure in the face of 1000's of screaming users, how many unintentional failures or wrong-assed tradeoffs did they simply not give a shit about?
I no longer need any bookmarks, I actually never bookmarked things, but if I feel like revisiting something I've seen 2 weeks ago and only remember just some bit of the title, it is VERY helpful. it has saved me a lot of time. You don't mess with my awesome bar...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
That's precisely what I was thinking.
It's sad that, when people use my computer, I have to tell them to use Internet Explorer. There's absolutely no way to create an exclusion list in Firefox's history, nor is there a "Delete all history for last 20 minutes" option.
I suppose I could probably brush up on my SQL an trim out the sqlite databases in my profile folder, but that's absurd.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
So if someone snoops around in your browser, they would see an addon called "HistoryBlock" which contains a list of all the sites you didn't want them to know you visit.
If you're worried about nosy people digging through your shit, you encrypt your files and lock your machine when you're not in front of it.
If you're worried about everyone seeing a list of your favorite porn sites every single time you type a URL, then you use the addon.
If someone's going to go out of his own way to embarrass you, then you're going to be embarrassed. When your web browser goes out of it's way to do that for him, whether he had the inclination to do it or not in the first place, then that's just fucking stupid.
GP, thanks for the link, good sir!
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
but i do have to use two browsers. opera is now my perv / anything that might be difficult to explain browser.
1. Maybe you don't want your wife....
Obviously, this scenario doesn't apply to Slashdot readers.
Heh, Speak for yourself. ;)
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Awesome Options 0.7 - its dev so you have to register https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8310
oldbar 1.2 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
old location bar 1.8 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637
Location Bar Limit - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7674
Using AO and Oldbar I can get nearly 95% or better ff2 behavior of my old ff2 location bar
so while i hate it at least i can minimize my pain
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
The location bar is awesome, in fact, the only place EVER where I've seen people being actually opposed to it is ... slashdot. So maybe it does have something to do with porn...
Maybe because slashdot understands the difference between a URL and a search? I don't mind the URL bar searching URL's when I type in it but not for keywords. If I watch to search for content, it should be done in a search context.
I'd imagine the awesomebar was made for people that type pizza or pizza.com in location bar when they want pizza.
I do not control the titles of the pages I visit, that's the webmasters. Firefox just gave them control of the indexing in your browser. Good thing sites don't try to bump their order in searches with optimizations... oh wait. Sure firefox will eventually bump them down, but until then you're stuck seeing "Great Deals AA AB AC AD AE AF AG AH AI"
@Mozilla: Locations (URL) go in Locations bar. Searches go in search bar. Don't punish your experienced users because half your users don't know difference.
I took my Linux laptop on a family vacation, and let my mom borrow it to check her email and browse the web. Imagine my chagrin a few minutes later when my mom quizzically announced "Facefuckers.com? What's this Facefuckers.com that keeps popping up?"
Darn Firefox 3 address bar. Rrgggh. Fortunately, it was newfangled and unfamiliar enough that I managed to convince her that she had just run into a random porn pop-up ad.
So, note to self: use Private Browsing for that sort of thing from now on. Posting anonymously for presumably obvious reasons. :-p
The ultimate solution to this problem is vimperator. There is no awesome bar whatsoever. And anyone who knows how to bring up the history on it is welcome to share my fine taste in erotica.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Install the Old Location Bar add-in. Takes you back to the FF 2 bar. That's what I did, not because of porn, but because 1) the new bar is abysmally slow; 2) I do not like the search by description.
or .. Get your credit cards ready ? ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Give us the option to TURN OFF THE AWESOME BAR. I'm sure many people think it's "awesome", but I believe it is a terrible pile of crap that breaks the way browsers have functioned for years, and offers absolutely zero benefits whatsoever. My typing the letter "s" does not mean the browser should assume I need a suggestion for every site I've ever been to where the URL or title might contain the letter "s" -- in fact, I can think of few assumptions more asinine.
Let us turn it the hell off. Solves the problem for people like me, solves the problem for people who want to hide porn, solves the problem for people who just plain don't like it. There is absolutely no reason this shouldn't be a one-click checkbox option, and yet there really is no way to disable it.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
It doesn't have to be porn. Privacy is privacy. I turned the 'feature aka bug' off on my firefox. google for directions.
Why would you bookmark porn to begin with? I just try to remember the sites, and I delete anything I download as soon as I am...cough...done.
Maybe the reason such acts are frowned upon isn't because everyone else is a prude, but because violence is a hell of a lot less contageous than lust.
I've seen more mobs than I've seen spontaneous orgies or even mass kissing, so I would dispute your claim in the first place, but even if it was true, so what? The common cold is more contagious than either but nowhere near as serious as even one act of violence.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
on a non-admin account that I delete after browsing...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
My only concern would be my kids finding it,
And what if they DID find it?
Would they somehow be "damaged"? Would they need "counselling?
Just exactly why do you care about a child seeing a woman's breast? Or for that matter, a penis.
But then of course, you wouldn't perchance be looking at homo penis porn would you? Hmmmnn?
No one has ever satisfactorily explained this situation to me.
Seems to be a uniquely American conundrum.. Ahhh, America!
.
- aqk
F U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc
RTFM:
firefox --no-remote -P [session name]
This enables to use two different sessions of firefox simultaneously. Just create a second session for porn, with different bookmarks.
Just the letter C, for instance, could have Camera-related sites, Cinemark, and for no reason at all the Washington Post.
And that for me is why it is not useful at all. The reason you got the Washington post is that it is a .com site and thus the awfullbar shows it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
This is the first time I've seen someone actually mention the core of the problem. Searching in URL, TITLE and TITLE headers are just plain stupid. I could live with it, if it was possibly to turn it off! Now the only option, mentioned below in this thread, is to disable it all together. :(
If someone could just tell it to stop searching in TTILE and I would be satisfied!
I have a friend who really didn't need to know what her year-younger brother wanted from a girlfriend while the pair of them were sharing a computer for college papers. 'Nuff said. The other thing that concerns me is the idea of anything that records all these sites on a public terminal that is supposed to have at least nominal privacy (i.e. library or lab computer).
(Just passing through Slashdot. Might create an account later.)
1+8+16+32 = 49
Sure? :P
Marriage is an arrangement between two people that want to live together (in civilized places this is not even attached to the sex of the partners).
Nowhere in that arrangement isn an implicit or explicit agreement to share absolutely everything about yourself with your partner.
Such complete encroachment in your private life will only undermine a relationship, each person needs his own private space in which to express himself. For some that is pornography, that is their choice, frankly it is nobody's business to tell those people they have a problem just because they chose not to share this with their partners.
Some people may, most people don't, so stop making these stupid generalizations about people's problems and projecting your own arrangements regarding personal privacy as some kind of universal golden rule.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Software that automatically changes menus or frequently-used options around as a "favor" to the user was bad UI practice five years ago in Windows and Office
Very very true.
, and it's bad UI practice today in Firefox.
That would be true if that were what it was doing. There are a couple of differences that make it an invalid comparison. History and bookmarks are changing all the time. It is a reasonable expectation that any view into them will change. For comparsion, that's like expecting google search results for current news to never change.
In addition, we're not talking about a menu or other typically fixed GUI elements here -- we're talking about data in a dropdown list, which is generally the kind of location you would expect dynamic data to be populated into.
Outside of that, the address bar gives me very consistent results, including only minor variances based on recent history and bookmark changes. Perhaps if I had experienced what you seem to (a different set of results every time I type?) then I would find it as annoying as you do.
I tried installing Google Chrome on my office computer, and Chrome took over, insisting on being the default browser and even running when I was trying to run Firefox. My conclusion was that the two can't peaceably coexist on the same computer. My recollection is that I even had to go so far as removing both programs just to get Firefox working correctly again.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
The Fear of The Black Planet finally has its worthy descendant The Fear of The Exposed Porn Bookmark.
The Start Menu and Office menus are fixed lists. The location bar has ALWAYS been ordered by some fluid criteria; you just don't like what they changed the criteria to.
The very advantage is that I don't have to start typing "en" to get to Wikipedia. I can start typing "wiki" -- the beginning of the name of the site, rather than the domain it happens to use. There's less for me to memorize, and even if Wikipedia isn't the first thing the first few times, it will rapidly bubble to the top. I don't understand how that's bad UI.
I can also find one-off pages again without having to trawl through Google or search my entire (year-long) history. The Awesomebar is indeed awesome.
If you want to be able to consistently get to the same sites by typing two letters and pressing Enter, why haven't you set bookmark keywords? They've been around since before Firefox was even "Firefox". Stop complaining that something nondeterministic isn't deterministic.
Yeah, which is also cool... I load my /. comments page far more often than the /. front page, but the front page is still the top item when I type "s"(lashdot) in the address bar. The comments page is the top result for "c", which is how I always reach it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Sure firefox will eventually bump them down, but until then you're stuck seeing "Great Deals AA AB AC AD AE AF AG AH AI"
Not going to work... highly visited pages will still be ranked above, and if you're looking for a page you've only been to once, it's going to be pretty far down the list anyway until you type a decent amount of the title.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I have many times found a URL again very easily with the so called "awful bar". Sometimes I remember part of a URL, sometimes I remember part of the title. It's useful. If you don't think it's useful you're just kidding yourself.
Pancakes. Oh I blew it.
1+8+16+32 = 49
It's for people like you that FF pops a warning when you try to use about:config. How long did it take you to get your browser back together?
Three minutes.
Actually, that's the time it took to realise I added an "8" to my post, if you read it you'll realise 49 was what I wanted anyway.