SEX, BOMBS & BURGERS

Just in case anybody needed more evidence about how porn can make or break a new technology, the Telegraph has a story about how Mozilla botched its latest web browser, Firefox 3, by making it hard for the user to hide what websites they've been visiting.

Mozilla released Firefox 3 in June and touted its "awesome bar," a toolbar that predicted where you wanted to go based on your browsing history and bookmarks, as one of its cool new features. But it turns out that people didn't exactly flock to the new version of the browser. When Mozilla asked users why, they said the browser was flawed - the awesome bar wouldn't hide websites that they'd visited.

Here's how Firefox developer Alex Faaborg explained it on his blog:

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 embarassing things that Firefox can to do you.

Of course, there are many types of potentially embarrassing websites you wouldn't want other people knowing you visited. Like if you were researching that rash of herpes you got over the weekend, or perhaps you were using your computer at work to look for another job. But as the Telegraph and several commentators on the Mozilla blog pointed out, porn sites would be the number one reason for why users were miffed at this particular flaw. Mozilla has fixed it with the release of Firefox 3.5.

The issue is also reminiscent of Microsoft's launch of Internet Explorer 8 back in March. The company touted the browser's "private mode" as a way to look at websites without them being tracked, with a wink-wink nod to porn.