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

Some things never changed

[istartedi]

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.

Re:To be more specific

[TooMuchToDo]

It's not an either/or. You can do both. For more fun, you can do both at the same time (whether those you're watching are on a video or in person is a function of how adventurous you are). My wife and I are young still though (I'm 26 and she's 25) so we haven't had all those old people stigmas kick in yet.

Re:Nothing to do with Porn, it's the Awfulbar agai

[timster]

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.

Re:Browse safely

[TheRealMindChild]

Sadly, you can get bit by this in Firefox too. The real bitch is, when I got infected, IE had never been explicitly opened and I don't "browse" the web with said machine. It turned out to be a flash, which was loaded by an ad banner from a hacked ad server, that was being served on a legitimate site.

In general, IE has tons more vectors for drive-by malware, but Firefox isn't immune, if for any other reason, because third party plugins can be the attack vector.