Microsoft posted a blog entry today detailing some of the new privacy features in the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. Among the new privacy features announced are InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking.
InPrivate Browsing gives users the option of browsing "off the record," as Microsoft puts it. That is, when InPrivate Browsing is active, IE 8 will not leave behind any trace of the browsing session: No history, cookies, passwords or anything of the sort will be saved. This could be useful when surfing the Web on a computer at a public library, for example.
Microsoft describes InPrivate Blocking as "a feature designed to help give you information about third-party content that has a line of sight into your Web browsing, and gives you a choice about what information you share with these sites." For example, say you visit thiswebsiterules.org, and the site has a part embedded into the page that might allow anothercoolsite.net to see that you visited the page. InPrivate Blocking gives you the option of preventing anothercoolsite.net from being able to do this.
Aside from InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking, IE 8 gives users more control when deleting their browsing history. For example, with IE 8 it is possible to delete cookies and your visited pages history while preserving passwords and temporary Internet files.
Although InPrivate Browsing and the more granular browsing history controls are not unique to IE 8--Safari has had both features for a while--both are features I am happy to see make their way into IE 8.
