IE8 beta lets users cover their tracks

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By David Worthington

August 29, 2008 — On Wednesday, a beta refresh of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 that includes new privacy and search features became available for download.

End users are the target audience for beta 2. It introduces granular privacy settings that Microsoft has dubbed InPrivate browsing and InPrivate blocking. InPrivate helps users cover their tracks as they browse by informing them about cookies that may observe their browsing history and permitting them to selectively remove those cookies.

Likewise, it eliminates all traces of a browsing session, leaving no user names, passwords or search queries behind.

“[InPrivate browsing] is a double-edged sword,” said Laura DiDio, a principal analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp. “It is good for home users, but at work, presumably it will have the same features for corporate users, which might not be something that is welcomed by supervisors.”

With InPrivate blocking, users may subscribe to lists of Web sites to block or allow. Other changes that target the user experience are crash recovery, a “diagnose connection problem” button, the ability to reopen closed tabs, and Compatibility View, which permits users to view Web sites that are "broken" by IE8’s standards compliance.

IE8 has three rendering modes: the default “full standards” mode that has already passed the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test and supports CSS 2.1; a mode that supports W3C standards in the same way as IE7; and a “quirks mode” that maintains compatibility with earlier editions of the browser.

It also selectively implements parts of the HTML 5 draft specification, including cross-document messaging, a client-side storage API, network connection awareness and a window location hash meant to place Web applications into the browser's back/forward stack.

Microsoft has added new search features to help users find what they are looking for on the Web. One of those is the Instant Search box, a feature that pulls up search results from the user’s chosen search provider and the user's browser history within the box.

The other is a little less conventional: suggested sites. IE8 makes recommendations about other, related sites that might be of interest to the user. It is not enabled by default.

The new search features fit within a concept that Microsoft is calling “Reach Beyond the Page.” As previously reported, other features in that concept are “Activities,” which is essentially a dialog box that lists available Web services when a user selects text, and “WebSlices,” which gives end users the ability to subscribe to portion of a Web page, including Silverlight controls.

Related Search Term(s): browsers, security, Microsoft

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