Mozilla says people refusing to upgrade to Firefox 3.0 in order to hide their, well, sensitive bookmarks

Aug 27th 2009
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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.