Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Privacy concern with GMail in Firefox 3 ?

Don't know if any one else have noticed, but when you are reading mails on GMail.com, it changes the html 'TITLE' of the page as the mail subject along with your email address. Something like "Gmail - - ". Since FF3 now displays (I don't remember seeing this problem with FF2) the page title also along with the urls matching in the Location bar, when you start typing "gmail.com", some of your personal data/information could get exposed (look at the screenshot below), unless you make sure you clear all the browsing history in the browser after you are done. Obviously this probably isn't a big concern when you are not sharing your computer with others.

I have checked Yahoo!, Hotmail & AOL webmail applications and they don't do the same - the title of the page doesn't change to the mail subject & email address. So no privacy issues there.

Also IE doesn't seem to display the page titles in location bar although I didn't check in the new IE8 beta.

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