Illicit bookmarks stopped some from upgrading to Firefox 3

A very interesting piece of information has emerged from Mozilla's security team about a group of users who have opted not to upgrade to Firefox 3. According to a blog entry at the Mozilla team's blog, at least one of the reasons was due to how a new feature delves into personal bookmarks to suggest a list of sites as the URL is typed into the location bar.

Following the release of Firefox 3, "a lot of people" contacted the Mozilla team to tell how they have bookmarks they didn't want exposed in such a manner. The cited reason, elaborated the blog, was that "in some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object."

I would assume that this was done to hide these bookmarks from other users of their computers--spouses and children come to mind. Obviously, an auto-suggest feature would defeat their valiant efforts at stashing these bookmarks away, and could also reveal embarrassing links at inopportune times during say, a presentation.

Of course, tweaks have since been added to allow users to disable the auto-suggestion. Besides being somewhat entertaining, the revelation of this insight is a somber reminder that UI design can have unexpected side effects that might be obvious only in hindsight.

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