Posted By: Charles | Aug 25th, 2008 @ 12:46 PM | 72,028 Views | 15 Comments

When you navigate your browser to website A is website A the only site you're visiting?

IE 8 Beta 2 is almost out of the oven. Given this, we of course want to find out all about it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Enter General Manager of Team Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, and Program Manager Andy Zeigler. The topic of this particular conversation (other IE8 interviews are in the pipeline) is a complex and important one: User Privacy and what IE 8 will do to inform users and protect their personal information when surfing the Internet.

Dean and the IE team are very passionate (and very serious about) user privacy. It’s a hard problem for a browser to solve, but a browser is the first line of defense and can therefore supply users with helpful information regarding what websites are involved with a particular session. Andy Zeigler is the Program Manager of the new Privacy features in IE 8. Dean and Andy shed light onto exactly what's been done in the realm of Privacy in IE 8 Beta 2. Two core new Privacy mechanisms are present in IE 8: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking (with InPrivate Subscriptions, a feed-based blocking service). We of course address more than the What, however, as you'd expect from Channel 9. Is true privacy on the Internet even achievable (is anonymity possible given the architecture and implementation of the Internet)? What role can a web browser play in protecting a user's personally identifiable data?  

Tune in. This is a great conversation.

Rating:
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JoshRoss
JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.
Is the IE8 internal name screwgle?  It seems like the privacy stuff would be very disruptive to adsense.  If you can't beat'em, screw'em.
JoshRoss
JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

Based upon past maneuvers, and the recent failed takeover of Yahoo, I would put this somewhere between the Bilderberg meetings and the supposed Roswell aliens.  Dead aliens aside, I just installed it and boy is it quick.  I also like the stuff on the new tab page.  It also gets almost double points on the acid3 test as IE7.

What privacy functions will be turned on by default when IE8 ships?   Blocking of 3rd party cookies?  This new 3rd party content blocking?  If its not on by default, it won't do much good for "mom, dad, and grandma".
This is great news. There is still work to be done with IE 8 though.  I would get a new beta out with a bug report button similar to safari.  This would allow some reporting mechanism for beta testers to report sites that are not working properly with IE8.  MS then needs to work with the different sites( popular/important ones) to fix the issues to make sure there is minimal pain to move to IE 8.

One example is the dnc.org website that has a video section.  The video uses silverlight and move networks player yet does not work with IE 8 even when the compatibility link is clicked.  The move player works elsewhere so this should be easy...

http://gallery.demconvention.com/

you don't have to get ie8 (inPrivate) to get rid of the autocomplete feature. It can be disabled readily on internet options/settings.

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