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.'"

Comments

Browse safely

[0racle]

That's why I use IE.

Re:Browse safely

[CarpetShark]

Ahh, but you won't be using IE for much longer. Now, Mozilla have finally put the last nail in IE's coffin. Now, you MUST upgrade to Firefox 3, or be branded a pervert.

Re:Browse safely

[AlphaBit]

That's why I use IE.

"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are"

Your ability to combine those two statements into a single post makes you one of the most irresistable trolls I've seen...

Re:Browse safely

[commodore64_love]

If two Anonymous Cowards speak to one another, does anyone hear them?

To be more specific

[93 Escort Wagon]

I'm guessing "they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection" at work.

Re:To be more specific

[MightyYar]

Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...

I don't hide my porn browsing from my wife, but I still don't want it popping up every time someone starts to type something into the address bar. I always cringe when a guest comes over and types "a" into the address bar and "Amateur Porn Blog" comes up as the first item in the list.

Re:To be more specific

[interkin3tic]

It's not an either/or. You can do both. For more fun, you can do both at the same time

Carefull: you can propose to do both at the same time and end up doing neither. ... I probably shouldn't have suggested the paper bag

Re:To be more specific

[WED Fan]

Why don't we have a mod for "I'm obviously lying, but here's my story anyway..."?

Re:To be more specific

[mcbutterbuns]

Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...

Wrong. Maybe you just need a wife and children who are into porn as well. Having a healthy sex drive is not a fault.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:To be more specific

[geminidomino]

...not related to age but to how far a stick is up their rectum.

Hey, if that's what they're into, who are you to judge?

Re:To be more specific

[Delkster]

where's the porn-block extension for autocomplete?

Or a porn-get extension with autocomplete?

Wait...what? There's PORN on the Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? I wouldn't have wasted all this time on Slashdot, Digg, and Fark.

Re:HistoryBlock

[xtracto]

History Block fixes this problem very nicely. It let's you setup a block list of urls that should not appear in the history.

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.

Classic.

Duh, that's the reason the extension ExtensionBlock exists. You can configure it to hide any extension you do not want other people to see (HistoryBlock, refspoof, firefusk, etc).