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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.'"

4 of 673 comments (clear)

  1. Re:To be more specific by SOdhner · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That would certainly be a problem, but I think for most people porn and work are kept separate and yet they still have those concerns:

    1. Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser

    2. Maybe you don't want slashdot popping up at work, thereby allowing them to realize that it's not blocked like every other site.

  2. Simple Answer by rehtonAesoohC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!!

  3. Nothing to do with Porn, it's the Awfulbar again. by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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,

    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.

  4. Re:HistoryBlock by Eil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.