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Comments: 673 +- Your Rights Online: Fear of Porn URL Exposure Discourages Firefox 3 Upgrade on Wednesday August 26, @12:54PM
Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday August 26, @12:54PM
from the porn-mode-incomplete-until-it's-a-separate-browser dept.
from the porn-mode-incomplete-until-it's-a-separate-browser dept.
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upgrades
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.'"
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Browse safely (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Browse safely (Score:5, Funny)
Ahh, but you won't be using IE for much longer. Now, Mozilla have finally put the last nail in IE's coffin. Now, you MUST upgrade to Firefox 3, or be branded a pervert.
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Re:Browse safely (Score:5, Funny)
If two Anonymous Cowards speak to one another, does anyone hear them?
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Re:Browse safely (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I use IE.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are"
Your ability to combine those two statements into a single post makes you one of the most irresistable trolls I've seen...
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Re:Browse safely (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but Chrome doesn't even have Print Preview [google.com]
At least IE has some nice page formatting options.
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Re:Browse safely (Score:5, Interesting)
In general, IE has tons more vectors for drive-by malware, but Firefox isn't immune, if for any other reason, because third party plugins can be the attack vector.
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To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
I'm guessing "they were afraid the browser would expose their porn collection" at work.
Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
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
For the most part I'd agree. I know personally that though I surf a decent amount of porn, and I surf a lot of "non work related" sites at work (gotta break up the monotony somehow), I know very well not to touch porn sites with a 10 foot firewall when at work. It's just not something a smart person does. They'll forgive you for playing solitaire at work. They'll forgive you for Slashdot. They'll even forgive you for Myspace. You get caught surfing porn at work though and 99% of the time you're gone, no questions asked. Still, every so often we'll catch some idiot doing it, much to my amazement.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh stop with the morals and ethics stuff. I should be able to do whatever I want to do, regardless of what I promised or said I'd do or what is good for my relationships with other people or what is good for other people. And, by the way, all this corporate and political corruption is really getting on my nerves, why can't they be good, ethical, moral, scientific, non-hypocritical promise-keeping citizens like me?
[/sarcasm]
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Re:To be more specific (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
It's not an either/or. You can do both. For more fun, you can do both at the same time
Carefull: you can propose to do both at the same time and end up doing neither. ... I probably shouldn't have suggested the paper bag
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
My wife and I are 41 and 43. That "old fart" stigma is not related to age but to how far a stick is up their rectum.
Naked bodies are not "dirty" sex is not "dirty" Those that believe it is have a serious emotional problem or physiological disorder. and yes I know this goes against the grain of the Puritanical popular stance that has overtaken the United states.
Who cares, My wife and I have sex with the windows open in the summer when it's a nice night out, and she is one hell of a screamer.
I can watch a movie where someone gruesomely tortures people to death in a public theater, but god forbid should we watch two people love each other in a sexual moment.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
...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?
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
Is watching others have sex instead of having sex with your spouse healthy?
I don't know about "healthy", but a bottle of wine and some porn can often lead to "sex with your spouse", quite the opposite of what you imply.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
For all you people who would usually just take offense to his question, instead show him proof that pornography is not an unhealthy addition to a relationship.
Is there any evidence that it is? Aside from the morality brigade, that is.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
Fortunately the male sex drive ceases immediately after marriage begins, so this should be an entirely sensible solution...
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Re:To be more specific (Score:4, Insightful)
My experience says that it's the female sex drive that ceases.
Besides, I don't see an issue: I have my account on the computer, she has hers.... She doesn't know my password. I surf anything I want and she won't know.
Every user on a computer should have their own account... no excuses...
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
Trust issues much? I haven't used a non-shared password on a home computer since I left a dorm. My wife knows every password I have, and so do some trusted friends.
The old adage that social engineering is the best security hole in the world goes both ways; a little bit of trust is a hell of a lot better than a lifetime of looking over your shoulder. If you're afraid of your wife seeing things, maybe you should (a) not do those things, or (b) talk to your wife about why you think it shouldn't be a problem, or (c) remain single. Hiding shit is not a good long-term plan.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you don't want your wife and kids to have porn urls popping up on the browser
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
Hah, are you kidding me!? I date girls that don't care if I look at porn because they like it too, and I'm not gonna marry anyone so prudish that she cares, because it's just porn! My only concern would be my kids finding it, but really I'd just have my own user account or my own computer so it wouldn't be a big deal.
You seriously are ridiculous if you think that being married means you can't enjoy porn, with or without your wife.
-Taylor
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe if you're married & have children you shouldn't be looking at porn, then you wouldn't have that problem...
I don't hide my porn browsing from my wife, but I still don't want it popping up every time someone starts to type something into the address bar. I always cringe when a guest comes over and types "a" into the address bar and "Amateur Porn Blog" comes up as the first item in the list.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:4, Insightful)
Two words: "Guest Account"
I do not get this, in the day and age of computers that are finally pretty much all multi-user capable... nobody uses it.
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Funny)
where's the porn-block extension for autocomplete?
Or a porn-get extension with autocomplete?
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Re:To be more specific (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:To be more specific (Score:5, Insightful)
forget porn, the last thing I need is my boss over my shoulder instructing me to type in a link and my prevalent searches of hot jobs, career builder and our competitor sites career section to pop up.
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Umm .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm .... (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're missing is that the FF developers think they know better than you. Personally, I hate the "awesomebar" because it's slow. If I have to wait for an auto complete function to catch up with my typing, something is very wrong. Auto complete should always be faster than manual entry.
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Re:Umm .... (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, it is configurable (about:config has a property that disables the bookmark searching), just not with a neat radio button.
Easy to find with a little googling, as well. I'd think that anyone trying to "hide" bookmarks in this way would have already figured it out.
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Re:Umm .... (Score:4, Funny)
It can't be that hard.
That depends on the sites you go to doesn't it? If your fetishes lie with something easy to spell and remember (grannysex) then it's probably easy to memorize the urls. If they lie with something harder to spell (bukkake, yes I had to look it up) or a strange combination of fetishes (bukkaking russian granny foot sex hairy gang bangs) they might be a little bit harder to memorize ;)
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Re:Umm .... (Score:4, Funny)
memorizing the porn URLs does NOT help.
Imagine discussing something with your boss, and saying "there's a good instructional video over on YouTube".
Boss: "Show me"
You key in "www.you...."
up pops:
http://www.youporn.com/ThreeHotChicksTakeItInTheAss [youporn.com]
http://www.youtube.com/ [youtube.com]
Yeah, this is a serious issue.
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Re:Umm .... (Score:4, Funny)
This is why I type "yout" so quickly when I want to show the family videos on YouTube. :-)
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Scary (Score:5, Insightful)
As time goes on, will we learn to be more circumspect, or will society change to accept that people are not perfect?
Wait...what? There's PORN on the Internet? (Score:5, Funny)
Why didn't someone tell me about this sooner? I wouldn't have wasted all this time on Slashdot, Digg, and Fark.
HistoryBlock (Score:4, Informative)
Re:HistoryBlock (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Some things never changed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Some things never changed (Score:4, Insightful)
10 years ago [...] Some said "I accidently
hit this link".
That was before pop-up blockers, IIRC, so I'd give them the benefit of the doubt there :)
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Changing autocomplete behavior using about:config (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Changing autocomplete behavior using about:conf (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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Simple Answer (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, use Google Chrome for your porn browsing, and then Firefox for your legit browsing.
In other words... Don't cross the streams!!
Nothing to do with Porn, it's the Awfulbar again. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Nothing to do with Porn, it's the Awfulbar agai (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Nothing to do with Porn, it's the Awfulbar agai (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Easy workaround in 3.5 (Score:5, Informative)
Select "nothing" and it won't look through either your history or your bookmarks.
take it or leave it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:about:config (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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