Canonical had to calm down quite a few people when they announced that the Unity Dash searches will also be done online, but now they are determined to nip the problem in the bud by installing a so-called “incognito” mode into the operating system.
Various solutions were proposed for solving this problem and people have started to wonder what’s going to happen in Ubuntu 13.04 which will have 100 lenses, most of them with online functionality.
The one who solved the issue was none other than Mark Shuttelworth, the founder of Ubuntu and one of the biggest supporters of the new Unity online search.
“We will make a very bold, clear way for you to turn on and off network queries across ALL scopes for any given session in the dash. Think about this like the 'anonymous' mode in your browser.
“Toggle it, right there in the Dash, and you are totally certain you are not sending network traffic. We will aim to enforce this at the kernel level, hence the CC to Jamie S who leads our security team,” stated Mark in a short entry on Launchpad.
He also said that people would have the ability the ability to configure the Home screen, including the choice of scopes, and the behavior of individual scopes.
The legal side of the issues will also be resolved by placing all the legal notices in one place, in the 'About Ubuntu' part of the UX, and visible in the install experience.
All these steps have been announced preemptively, way before the launch of Ubuntu 13.04, so that everyone will get to know what to expect from the new operating system.
In Ubuntu 12.10, Canonical has implemented a way of shutting down the online searches, but users would have had to know where the option is or that it even existed.
We will be sharing more details about this incognito mode once they become available.
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