One of my closest friends is a gay. His family doesn't know it and though a few friends do, he's spent the past 2 years trying to figure out how to deal with the issue. I met him in our local coffee shop yesterday and he said, "Well, now they know".
I knew what he was talking about immediately, and asked, "How'd you break it to them?" He said "I didn't"
It turns out that my friend had just upgraded to Firefox 3 along with about 10 million other people, and hadn't had it for more than a day when his parents came over for a visit. His mother asked if she could log into her Hotmail acount to check on some random ebay purchase.
He was standing next to her as she began typing the URL into the address bar and watched in horror as a drop down menu appeared with every recent craigslist personals search he's made that contained the word "hot"! in large, 2 line descriptions!
I've done a little research, and apparently, the autocomplete function of URLs in the address bar has been changed in Firefox 3 to include the title of the web page as a discription which accompanies the web address.
In Firefox 3, a craigslist personals address like:
..http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/m4m/747986.html
becomes:
Looking to have some dirty hot fun at my place - 21 ..http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/m4m/747986.html
And thusly my friend's mother learned her son was gay. I'm sure it's better in the long run but I believe he'd have done it better himself.
UPDATE: Several sites have mentioned that bookmarks are included in the dropdown menu of Firefox 3. I am checking on that now. If so, thousands of Kossacks will be mortified in the coming months!
UPDATE II: according to Mozilla, bookmark titles are also included in the location bar drop down results. Time to rename all your private bookmarks!!!