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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."
Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? I wouldn't have wasted all this time on Slashdot, Digg, and Fark.
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.
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.
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.
Why don't we have a mod for "I'm obviously lying, but here's my story anyway..."?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
Wrong. Maybe you just need a wife and children who are into porn as well. Having a healthy sex drive is not a fault.
There, fixed that for you.
...not related to age but to how far a stick is up their rectum.
Hey, if that's what they're into, who are you to judge?
where's the porn-block extension for autocomplete?
Or a porn-get extension with autocomplete?
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.