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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.'"
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.
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.