Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/08/26/porn-collection-put-people-off-upgrading-to-firefox-3/

by jedliu • 17 years ago

67 32 17 years ago

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

There's a nice object lesson here about fully understanding the impact of a system change on your users. Making things "better" for them often isn't.

kingsley_20• 17 years ago

Actually, I think that the lesson is more of balancing existing, niche user needs against prospective mass user needs. Almost nobody gets this right, but it's a wonderfully challenging game.

For one, I would have made the awesome-bar return some search results as well, and made it impossible to distinguish between those and the bookmark results. They could also have compared auto-completes against whitelists/blacklists.

FooBarWidget2• 17 years ago

With that kind of attitude, user interfaces should never, ever change. I don't think a conservative attitude like this is the path to success.

philh• 17 years ago

With that kind of attitude, user interface changes get carefully considered and tested before being rolled out.

growt4• 17 years ago

firefox 3's location bar is a mess, not just because of this issue. It will suggest me a gmail authentication string for almost all of my inputs. There are lots of ways to do this better. I like chromes way of doing it, but it has some privacy issues.

ivank• 17 years ago

You can select a suggestion with the arrow keys and hit Delete to delete anything.

growt4• 17 years ago

I know but I would have to do it after every login at gmail. Firefox should just not include substrings.

pbhjpbhj3• 17 years ago

If you select a different entry then that entry gets promoted next time you type the same string. So if you type "g" and a gmail address comes up but you cursor down to "engadget" (say) then next time you press "g" engadget is more likely to come up. After a few iterations g will bring up engadget as the first selection. It's awesome!

growt4• 17 years ago

awesome? you're easily impressed, are you? :)

kqr22• 17 years ago

Firefox private browsing aka porn mode:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...

scotth• 17 years ago

This article is about the awesomebar exposing bookmarks that previously were only accessible through navigating deep folder hierarchies. Porn mode has nothing to do with this. Read the article.

pbhjpbhj3• 17 years ago

Saying it has "nothing" to do with it is a bit extreme. What if "porn mode" (private browsing) were implemented as a password protected sub-session that allowed bookmarks to be saved, cookies kept, etc., but insulated from the standard browser use with files saved in an encrypted folder.

That would also allow for a person to masquerade more easily as different users.

Indeed private browsing mode could be another, hidden, user profile that happens to have encryption - if a username:password is supplied then the session is saved, if not then it's deleted on browser close.

nailer2• 17 years ago

Porn mode has everything to do with this - yes, they're separate features, but they relate strongly to each other. Private Browsing avoids saving visited sites to history, which includes stopping them from appearing in the Awesomebar.

Between 3.0 and 3.5, there was Awesomebar but no Private Browsing. So when you typed 'g' to start 'gmail.com', it might have shown 'Naked Black Girls', which appeared in your history because there was no private browsing and you forgot to manually clear the cache.

The ideal would have been to introduce Private Browsing and Awesomebar at the same time, to handle this situations.

kqr22• 17 years ago

Did you read the article? The article mentions private browsing mode but doesn't provide any details.

No wonder Mozilla hastily introduce a Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5…

The above link simply provides more information on it.

The "porn mode" comes from the title of the link itself.

ilyak• 17 years ago

make it turnoffable!

vetinari3• 17 years ago

It is.

asjo4• 17 years ago

A pointer to how would be useful...

Perceval• 17 years ago

I wrote a proposal for an extension that could passively solve the porn+awesomebar problem in the same way that AdBlock Plus passively solves the ad blocking problem. Since I am not a coder, I can’t whip up an alpha proof of concept, but perhaps someone else can take a crack at it. (I pitched it to Wladimir Palant a while back, but he wasn’t interested).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/2/5/43412/24669

Apparently, there are already hooks in userChrome.css that allow preventing results from appearing in the awesomebar on a per URL basis:

http://ed.agadak.net/2009/02/hiding-history-with-userchrome

paul9290• 17 years ago

Porn is that important to that many??? Just use the google search to go to such websites! The people they are trying to hide it from obviously are not tech savvy and won't know what cache is or where to find it.