Slashdot Mirror
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
Duh, that's the reason the extension ExtensionBlock exists. You can configure it to hide any extension you do not want other people to see (HistoryBlock, refspoof, firefusk, etc).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'