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

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.