Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 in June of 2008, but there’s still a few of you out there who haven’t upgraded, despite, if nothing else, the security improvements. So what gives? Mozilla asked the abstainers, essentially, “Why haven’t you upgraded?” The answer, of course, has to do with Internet pornography. Doesn’t it always?
One of the shiny, new features of Firefox 3.0 (we’re now at Firefox 3.5.2, by the way) was the AwesomeBar, the nickname applied to the improved address bar. In older versions of Firefox, the address bar would only store addresses that you visited and/or typed in. So, if you always visit marca.com, whenever you typed “m” “marca.com” would pop up. And that’s the way these people liked it.
The problem with the AwesomeBar is that, not only does it search addresses you’ve typed/visited, but it also searches your bookmarks. Let’s say you have “hotgirlsdoinghotthings.com” bookmarked way in there, several layers below the fold, as it were. This becomes a problem if you share a computer with, say, your wife, and you don’t want her to see your crazy Web sites you’ve bookmarked whenever she types in the letter “h.”
Says a Mozilla designer:
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. In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarrassing things that Firefox can do to you.
So, tsk-tsk, people are, to use a rubbish cliché, biting their nose to spite their face, denying themselves the wonders of Firefox 3.0 because they’re being all secretive. Oh, dear.
Maybe what they should have is a feature that allows the user to set a URL to never appear in history or search bar. That would be kinda nice… not for porn or anything, just for, you know, like hiding the websites where I do my birthday shopping for my wife and stuff. Cuz I don’t want her to know what I’m getting her, see?
This seems like a legitimate complaint to me (not that I bookmark “sensitive” sites myself, of course).
But it’s also fixed, at least as of 3.5.1 on Mac. There is a menu under “Privacy” for location bar that allows History and Bookmarks, History, Bookmarks, or Nothing. So as long as once cleans up one’s history, no problem.
I once read an interesting article in Bob Cringely’s blog about browser histories. Essentially he suggests that you don’t want an empty history, then the question is what are you hiding.
You really want the history of someone less shady than you. That would be a solid feature. A randomly generated history of approved sites: the professor, the soccer mom, the sports fanatic, etc.
I suppose you need to wear protection even for cyber sex. It seems almost impossible to troll the dark underbelly of the net with standard settings, especially in Internet Explorer. I personally run two browser instances: Firefox with zero history and maximum security and the Chrome for everyday browsing.
blog a few years ago about browser histories. Essentially he suggests that you don’t want an empty history, then the question is what are you hiding.
You really want the history of someone less shady than you. That would be a solid feature. A randomly generated history of approved sites: the professor, the soccer mom, the sports fanatic, etc.
they should just take advantage of the firefox multi profile capability and use a separate profile for their sensitive bookmarks
I did not much care for the awesome bar. I would have loved the option to turn it off, it was more annoying then awesome.
There’s this real neat feature in most operating systems called multi user access. If you share a home computer, just setup an account for you and one for your wife. When you’re not using the computer, just log out. What happens within your account stays there.
yea….
missing a few cool functions from 3.0 Firefox vs. getting caught by a wife who has anger issues watching porn.
I’m pretty sure those who have decided not to upgrade weighed by sides.