Twitter reveals Firefox stores cached data up to 7 days

Twitter said cached data on Firefox remains even after the user has logged out of the platform.

Twitter said cached data on Firefox can lead to anyone accessing it. (AFP)

Twitter earlier this week announced that Mozilla Firefox browser stores cached data even after the user logs out of their account. Twitter said this may lead to access of private information on public or shared computers. It also confirmed that this issue doesn't affect browsers like Safari or Google Chrome.

Twitter in a blog post explained that cached data can come from activities like "downloading your Twitter data archive or sending or receiving media via Direct Message" on Firefox. Also, the cached data remains on that computer for up to seven days. This doesn't necessarily affect personal devices.

Twitter said it has fixed this issue by not allowing Firefox to store any Twitter data in the cache. However, it still advised users to clear the browser cache even after logging out of Twitter. In response to this, Mozilla Firefox acknowledged that this does indeed happen and also explained why.

"The technical details are complicated but the high level is pretty simple: caching is complicated and each browser behaves somewhat differently; with the particular way that Twitter had their site set up, Chrome, Safari, and Edge don't cache this data but Firefox will. It's not that we're right and they're wrong. It's just a normal difference in browser behavior," Firefox said in a blog post.

Firefox also highlighted how there is a standard way to ensure that browsers don't store cached data. But Twitter didn't use it until recently and was instead dependent on a particular browser's way of working.

"However, it's also a good reminder of how important it is to have web standards rather than just relying on whatever one particular browser happens to do," Firefox added.