Friday, Aug 28, 2009    Text size: 

Mozilla released Firefox in June 2008 to much fanfare. One of the browser's most prominent new features was an improved browser bar that doubles as a search field and a dynamically updated history listing. Instead of having to type in an exact website address to find a previously visited site, users could simply type in words related to the site itself to see a variety of suggestions.

But the drawback was that the new feature, which Mozilla called the "Awesomebar," worked too well. Users typed in any number of innocuous search strings only to see a lit of previous porn searches appear because the adult sites happened to share a letter or two with the current search.

"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," Mozilla's Alex Faabor said.

The open-source giant sent out a questionnaire about the issue and found that one-quarter of Firefox 2 users were putting off the jump to version 3 because of this very problem.

Mozilla added a porn mode, called Private Browsing, to Firefox 3.5. The option is listed under the Tools menu tab and will close and save all current browser windows during the private session.