Firefox: Awesomebar or Breach of Trust?

Very grave accusations, but not much confirmation that Mozilla made a mistake or went "1984" on us.

Is it a Mozilla bug? Is it a local incident? Did the Sabayon packaging alter something it shouldn't?

Until this has been confirmed, I'll give Mozilla the benefit of doubt.

I'll second this comment...

The fact is that FF3 uses a different database back-end to store history and bookmark data (the so-called "Places" thingamajig). If you install FF3 and load it up with an old FF2 user profile, it will read the old files and import the data into the new database. But it will never remove the old debris. If you empty the history database, it will be reloaded with the old history.rdf data next time you load up FF3. Soo.... This is a difficult to solve bug, because it ends up in endless bike-shedding discussions, on the delicate issue of deleting or not deleting old data from a user profile when upgrading the application.

If one is truly security conscious and want to both minimize and be able to detect any security leaks in FF, the proper procedure to upgrade FF (or any browser) is to export your bookmarks and certificates (which you should regularly for backup reasons anyway), delete the old profile and import the data into a new profile created by the upgraded application.