

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

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michael_dorfman
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.

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FooBarWidget
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.

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

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FooBarWidget
That's like saying that before writing a blog post, one should consult a
psychologist to research every word's implications on human readers.

If you have a multi-billion dollar budget to test every pixel of the user
interface then fine, but what if you're an indie developer and have to do with
a budget of $100?

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Retric
Then do A / B testing.

The "cheep" way to do A / B testing is for B to always be the existing system.
Roll out changes to 10% of your users and see how they respond. Just remember
_if_ your users hate it then fix the problem and test it again or abandon the
idea. So, this only works when you can measure how they resound to changes.

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pbhjpbhj
Allow for the change to bed in. When the awesome bar came out I immediately
disliked it, possibly hated it even: now I find it both useful and generally
awesome. It [the awesome bar] takes time to learn the best response to each
key string, now i rarely need to type more than 3 letters to find the address
i want, often just one letter.

Also a UI change can get more plaudits by virtue of the placebo effect, IMO
(I've not done double blind tests!), making things appear better simply cause
the look has changed.

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growt
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.

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pbhjpbhj
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!

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

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pyre
I think he was jokingly using the name of the 'Awesome Bar' in his response.

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growt
Ok you're right.

Firefox on the other hand seems to be kind of a douche, calling itself
awesome.

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Perceval
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>

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paul9290
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.

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ilyak
make it turnoffable!

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vetinari
It is.

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asjo
A pointer to how would be useful...

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sp332
go to about:config, set places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and
places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus to 0. Then use private browsing when you
visit those "secret" links.

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vetinari
or go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.richResults to false.

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asjo
Is that a preference that I need to add, or did you mean
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults?

No, setting maxRichResults to 0 totally breaks the bar (no completion at all
when typing.)

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vetinari
No, maxRichResults and richResults are separate preferences. See also:

<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.richResults>

and

<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults>

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asjo
Thanks for the links and clarification.

The page on browser.urlbar.richResults says: "Has an effect in * Mozilla
Firefox (nightly builds from 2007-11-29 to 2007-12-17)"

So I guess you need to do what it says under "Background" to get rid of the
awesome bar: "If you’d like to disable the improved Location Bar dropdown in a
version of Firefox without this preference, try the oldbar extension."

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kqr2
Firefox private browsing aka porn mode:

[http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...](http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AKA__Porn_Mode__Arrives)

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scotth
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.

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nailer
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.

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sp332
You're not paying the slightest bit of attention. This is for BOOKMARKS, not
history.

