Microsoft will be addressing a lot of privacy issues in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, which will be released to the public soon. The new version of the browser will include a private browsing mode called InPrivate, and when it’s enabled cookies aren’t stored, history isn’t recorded, and a lot of your other data is never saved. For people who work on public computers this kind of feature can offer a little piece of mind.
One other handy feature that will be included is the ability to clear out all of your history, passwords, cookies, and more for all websites except those located in your favorites. That means clearing out all of your cookies won’t cause you to have to login again to the sites that reside in your bookmarks.
The last thing that I wanted to point out is a feature they’re calling InPrivate Subscriptions. Here’s how the IE8 team describes this feature:
Under the covers, InPrivate Subscriptions are simply RSS feeds of Regular Expressions that specify sub-downloads to block or allow. Anyone can publish an InPrivate Subscription on their website, just as they can offer an Accelerator or Web Slice on their website.
Essentially with InPrivate Subscriptions users will be able to subscribe to lists of sites that should be blocked. Anyone can create their own list, and then publish it on their own site to share with the world. Content including images, scripts, and CSS files can all be blocked using InPrivate Subscriptions. While it may not be the intended use I’m sure there will be plenty of these subscriptions created to block advertisements from around the web.
So what do you think? Is Internet Explorer 8 shaping up to be a great browser? Here’s a rather lengthy interview (38 minutes) with some of the managers from the Internet Explorer team outlining how some of the new features will work.
[via IE8 Blog] Thanks Claus!
InPrivate=Porn mode
Won’t Microsoft get into some hot water with this one? I know Opera, Firefox have them but they are addons and the user has the choice, with this no choice so web site peeps might be a bit ticked off.
Good ideas, but I don’t think I’d switch back to IE even if they paid me. Serious.
I think the InPrivate mode is a nice feature. However, isn’t this the same as configuring Firefox to clear out your cache, cookies, history, etc when closing the browser? I would think so with the only difference being this is a single option and from what I read, the browser will never store cookies. Again, it’s nice in theory, but I am not sure how practical it is.
Users will still need to find an ad-blocking subscription before they’d be able to block the ads, and Microsoft isn’t promoting this as the intended use. So they are probably about as safe as Firefox and Opera are.
When you clear out the data in Firefox it wipes everything out. By using InPrivate you could have it stop recording cookies, history, and more for a certain period of time. It would therefore keep your past data in tact.
About the blocking of content. Most people will not use this feature, let alone to block ads – just like most people don’t use adblock plus in Firefox – so this will be a non-issue. The only people using it are people who you aren’t going to be making any money by standard advertising methods anyway. Also, since they are not marketing it as an ad-blocker, they shouldn’t get in trouble from advertisers.
I remember when I interned on the IE8 team, and they were talking about this very issue. Believe me, they have thought about it, and are covering all angles. But yes, it’s awesome that you can block ads in IE now.
That’s a good point and did not think of that until I read something about it on CNET today.
That’s pretty cool… I didn’t realize you interned there.