Awesome Bar Awkwardness Stymies Firefox Upgrades
Firefox enjoys one the of the fastest upgrade turnarounds in the software world. Typically, Mozilla can boast that about 90 percent of its users will upgrade within a year of major new release. But what about that 10 percent that holds on to its older, potentially insecure browsers?
The Mozilla Blog of Metrics exists largely to answer questions like that and, in the case of the migration from Firefox 2 to 3, it turns out that shame and embarrassment were at the top of the list of reasons for not upgrading.
Firefox 3 introduced the new smart address bar, aka the “Awesome bar”, which significantly changed to the way history and bookmark searches worked in the browser’s URL field. But it turns out that a number of you are heading to websites you don’t want showing up in later searches.
It can be awkward. Imagine you’re interning at Pitchfork and someone sits down at your workstation only to discover you’ve been visiting an ABBA cover band’s MySpace page. Or imagine if Wired.com’s tech team discovered that Webmonkey staffers had hacked all their admin sites to customize their default installations?
Then there’s the porn thing.
The initial version of the awesome bar lacked a good way to selectively control what shows up in your URL bar when you children sit down to do a bit of web browsing. And, clearly, a sizable slice of the Firefox user base was adversely affected by that oversight.
But what’s really interesting is that even though that issue has since been addressed — the URL bar in Firefox 3.5 allows you to choose between searching just history, just bookmarks, both or nothing at all — people still don’t want to upgrade.
Of course, concern about exposing your dirty web browsing secrets isn’t the only reason people won’t upgrade. Head over to the Mozilla Metrics Blog for some other reasons, ranging from the pretty good (web designers who need to test sites in older versions of Firefox) to the deeply confused (”If you say this is free… I have always heard there is really nothing free in this world”).
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