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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.'"
That's why I use IE.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I'm guessing "they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection" at work.
#DeleteChrome
Then making it a configurable option: Enable/disable. Or am I missing something?
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? I wouldn't have wasted all this time on Slashdot, Digg, and Fark.
Did you even bother to read the summary? This is about the awesome bar going into your bookmarks and then adding those URLs in as suggested site to go to. This has nothing to do with clearing your history or cookies or anything else.
History Block fixes this problem very nicely. It let's you setup a block list of urls that should not appear in the history.
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What's the ranking of the question "How do I get rid of the Awsomebar" on various forums?
Pretty high, I bet.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
It is configurable, albeit not through the options dialog. In about:config browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = 1 or 0 1 for firefox 2 style, 0 for no search browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped = true That will turn it off, if it really bothers you
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]
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!!
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.
Or even better, hum, opt-out? What if I reaaaally don't want the feature?
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
The problem is that Clear Private Data does not work.
I remember when I first upgraded to FF3, and was shocked to find that when I "cleared private data" and then clicked on the URL drop-down there were still all the web sites I had visited.
The "Awesome bar" does not get cleared out!
I had to install some plug-in to restore that functionality.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Too bad I can't mod tags. +1 nailedit
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
you can use the profile manger to make a "special" (/cough pron) profile then switch to that for your "special" browsing needs then swtich back to you wife/boss/kid ..etc safe profile when you are ummm done..... YOU SICK BASTARD =p
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Tag all porn bookmarks as "xxx Bookmark Name" instead of "Bookmark Name". ("XXX" can literally be "XXX"!)
Write a plugin that only shows those bookmarks in the awesome bar if you type in XXX first.
Also restrict the history results in the awesome bar to only show hits from a given domain if it is NOT in an xxx-tagged bookmark.
You get to hide your bookmarks and history from anyone who isn't specifically looking for it.
You get to use the awesome bar to access your stuff.
It's not about hiding your shit well, it's about making sure it doesn't pop up automagically.
The only other solution is to move onto having profiles for browsers.
Open FF, use the net.
Want your bookmarks and history and cool stuff?
Log in to Firefox instead of using the open account.
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.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
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"
I really don't understand this problem. The first time I typed in "en" to get to wikipedia, sure a ton of other stuff -- in my case all of it being other urls I'd visited that started with en -- comes up, but then I select the one I want, and from then on Firefox immediately goes to the one I wanted.
So basically, restricting the search to urls like you want doesn't solve this "problem" unless you visit very few urls to begin with, and since the software learns what you want it isn't a problem after the first click anyawy. What, you only use url abbreviations once ever, but want firefox to still be able to predict what you wanted?
However if what I wanted was my "English, ASCII, and Unicode" from my bookmarks, then I would have clicked that, and Firefox would have learned that is what I want. Sounds useful for people who work that way.
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
It's not moving menu items around. The menu in question is a dynamic history with auto-complete. How could it not change unless you never did anything? And since one of the changes is to figure out what you meant when you type something, how is this a bad thing? What, you want an unsorted undynamic history pulldown? How does that make any sense?
The enemies of Democracy are
Firefox'es success is mainly tied to their focus on filling end user needs, listening to end users for suggestions instead of replying .
If this is a problem enough to make people stay on old version, it should be fixed somehow instead of blogging or joking about it. Think like they are your customers while you don't actually sell a product and treat them same way.
Do you know how Cisco etc. survived in darkest days of dotcom crash? Who needed the best routers and servers to serve their customers?
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".
Amen, brother.
I didn't install Firefox 3 until there was a plugin to kill the Awesomebar. It really was a dealbreaker for me.
I hate UIs that try to be helpful but end up distracting or otherwise messing up a clean interface.
The old Google autocomplete was a great example of this - it'd type directly into the search bar while you typed in your search term, which means that if you typoed and needed to delete the last key entered, you'd delete the autocomplete instead, which broke, you know, typing. It was also distracting seeing text appear where you're typing, not only because it was constantly flashing words before your eyes, but also because if you're a touch typist you use the text up there to make sure you haven't typoed, and seeing an 'f' appear on the screen when you're about to type an 'm' triggers that correction reflex.
The current design is much better, with the dropdown box at least off to the side while you type in your search term.
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...
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.
I'm sure that if you fire up about:config you might be able to tweak this behaviour but really by default it should be disabled, or at least disabled if history is set to 0. It's a monumental oversight to leave it the way it is and I hope it is fixed.
But according to my statistics, Firefox 3 is the most used browser. If this story is true, then how many more would switch?
My web domain.
Technically, it is configurable (about:config has a property that disables the bookmark searching), just not with a neat radio button.
Sure. In fact, I've done this myself and it wasn't that hard.
It's still annoying as hell that they made a totally major UI change... and they didn't also make an easy way to turn it off along with it.
Tweet, tweet.
And for another horrible decision, consider how they handle keywords.
The Keyword functionality is a great idea in Firefox, but it feels like the devs hate it - they hide it away in the UI, it's underfeatured, and it doesn't work with Awful Bar. If I type "wp Sasquatch" to get to the wikipedia page for Sasquatch, that doesn't get saved in the history - and the Great Bar doesn't realize that what you're typing may be using a keyword. So when I again type "wp Sasq", odds are I just get no results at all from the Bar. Instead, Firefox locks up for a few seconds while churning away finding irrelevant pages I haven't been to in months.
I saw quite a few complaints about this behavior early on. The response was essentially that's tough, take it or leave it. Apparently a number of users left it.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Sorry, I was not able to read your post due to the high amounts of absurd BS you put on it. You begin by taking just 2 examples and generalize into the whole free software environment. Then you come with it scaring users again, sorry, but the awesome bar has so far scared just a couple of judgemental geeks that were turned off by the awesome bar after they tried it ONCE, they never bothered testing it for a week to see how it gets fed with your habits and becomes being INCREDIBLY useful...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
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.
If you're worried about nosy people digging through your shit, you encrypt your files and lock your machine when you're not in front of it.
If you're worried about everyone seeing a list of your favorite porn sites every single time you type a URL, then you use the addon.
If someone's going to go out of his own way to embarrass you, then you're going to be embarrassed. When your web browser goes out of it's way to do that for him, whether he had the inclination to do it or not in the first place, then that's just fucking stupid.
GP, thanks for the link, good sir!
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Why would you bookmark porn to begin with? I just try to remember the sites, and I delete anything I download as soon as I am...cough...done.
Marriage is an arrangement between two people that want to live together (in civilized places this is not even attached to the sex of the partners).
Nowhere in that arrangement isn an implicit or explicit agreement to share absolutely everything about yourself with your partner.
Such complete encroachment in your private life will only undermine a relationship, each person needs his own private space in which to express himself. For some that is pornography, that is their choice, frankly it is nobody's business to tell those people they have a problem just because they chose not to share this with their partners.
Some people may, most people don't, so stop making these stupid generalizations about people's problems and projecting your own arrangements regarding personal privacy as some kind of universal golden rule.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.