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Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

pcpro.co.uk

11–20 of 33 posts

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#11
post #5

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.

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

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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?

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#14
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#15
post #5

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.

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!

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#16
post #10
post #6

Firefox private browsing aka porn mode: http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AK...

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.

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.

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#17
post #11
post #5

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.

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

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

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#18
post #5

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.

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!

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

Re: Porn collection put people off upgrading to Firefox 3

#19
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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