This question already has answers here: Closed 7 years ago .

If you inspect the POST parameters of Gmail login with Firebug or Chrome developer tools, you'll see a _utf8 parameter with a value of ☃ :

_utf8:☃

(See the attached image in case your browser doesn't render the value. It's a snowman, U+2603, http://www.utf8-character.info/#!%E2%98%83 .)

Why do they do this? Is it possible that they somehow test for browser compatibility to UTF-8?