Firefox bug causes breakup with fiancé

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 27 Mar 2006 at 16:55

Step 9 is 'Break-up with fiancé', but steps 1 to 8 detail a bug in Firefox's password manager submitted to Mozilla's Bugzilla flaw reporting service.

According to the details of the bug, Firefox isn't very good at keeping details between XP accounts separate, causing the account holders in this case to, well, separate.

Just how this particular privacy issue ended up in a relationship breakdown emerges from the bug report. The website designer that submitted the report writes that she had changed her mind when Firefox asked whether it should save the password for her website and dived into Password Manager to change her preference.

What she found when she got there were the preferences of her fiancé: a list of dating and swinging websites that he had set to explicitly, and understandably, never save a password for.

'Then I realized who, how and what,' the report reads, 'And sh*t hit the fan. Your browser does not efficiently respect the privacy of different users for one system ... Firefox should be respecting every single area of privacy per user on one system. It's not doing that... I'm going to submit this as Major because not everyone shares one computer, but it should really be considered Critical.'

Bugzilla now classes the bug as 'resolved'.