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Fear of Porn URL Exposure Discourages Firefox 3 Upgrade

Posted by timothy on from the porn-mode-incomplete-until-it's-a-separate-browser dept.

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.'"

5 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Changing autocomplete behavior using about:config by JacobSteelsmith · · Score: 4, Informative

    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]

  2. Re:about:config by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 5, Informative

    You need to use about:config for 3.0, but in 3.5 they included the option to disable location bar searching in options... that's the whole point of this story, Mozilla took user feedback based on users who wouldn't upgrade to fix the issues they had with 3.0.

    It's very easy to find now, under Privacy in Options at the bottom.

  3. Re:Umm .... by Knara · · Score: 4, Informative

    Technically, it is configurable (about:config has a property that disables the bookmark searching), just not with a neat radio button.

    Easy to find with a little googling, as well. I'd think that anyone trying to "hide" bookmarks in this way would have already figured it out.

  4. Re:Changing autocomplete behavior using about:conf by srjh · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  5. Easy workaround in 3.5 by Ian+Alexander · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.