Was Porn Shame Behind the Rejection of Firefox 3?

CYBERSPACE—The mainstream is being somewhat coy with respect to an issue many consumers had with the Fx3 upgrade to the Firefox browser released early this year. Among several other problems with the upgrade, people were decidedly nonplussed by the fact that the browsing history could not be deleted from the location bar, nor could the computer owner decide what sites were visible in the bar.

Recently, however, the Telegraph spoke directly to the issue, asking if it was "porn embarrassment" that was the problem. Well, duh. Unless you are planning attacks of some kind or trolling the web for the latest in Ku Klux Klan fashions, it's the adult sites that one usually wants to keep from prying eyes, and certainly from those just glancing at the screen.

In light of that, it is easy to see why the inability to control the browsing history was the number one reason why people either did not upgrade to Fx3, or downgraded back to Fx2 after experiencing the supposedly superior version, and why it beat out other problematic issues as speed/memory leak concerns, add-on compatibility, the look and feel of the interface and browser crashes, to name a few.

The oversight was so egregious, of course, that it has already been fixed and noted by Mozilla's Blog of Metrics. "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 now in Firefox 3.5, users have complete control over what types of information are displayed in the location bar (or suggestions can be turned off entirely).

Now, about those other problems...