People have had access to this feature for years now from Safari and Firefox, and things haven't exploded. Why is it suddenly a concern with a beta of IE8?

People are really eager to find MS conspiracies to write about. I guess if you're a tech journalist, it's kind of like the white whale of your industry.

How it can be done it Firefox, is there some plugin to do it? I am just curious...I am aware that I can switch on erasing my private data when I close Firefox, but that isn't the same thing.

My guess is that IE8 finally makes the feature prominent, like the Back button. But haven't seen it yet, so maybe someone who has can comment?

"Although casual users cannot see the previous user’s search history, authorities such as the police will be able to access it if necessary."

So everything is actually still there, just not present in the UI? Seems pretty silly if so.

I think the article is simplified a bit for the masses who don't understand how the internet operates.

Cookies and browser history aren't saved locally(is my guess of IE8, I haven't used it), but the ISP and/or Website could still have a record of your visit which could be obtained by the police.

I think it means that the ISP will still spy on your movements. Recent laws passed in the UK make ISPs eavesdrop on their users.

It's a very confusing article, probably plain wrong.

> Microsoft and Google failed to return calls last night.

They're just, you know, shy and unsure of what to say. Should they commit to this relationship? They've been burned before.

>> "In allowing surfers to access websites but conceal their browsing behaviour, Microsoft prevents internet sites from collecting information about their users" <<

How exactly? I don't get it. I supposed they just turn off local cache and local browsing history...

InPrivate Blocking feature won't allow the site you're visiting to send information to third-party sites, various ad sites, google-analitics.com and friends included.

I think you missed the point. Google (like most large ad networks) does a lot more than just contextual advertising, especially now that they own DoubleClick. There are a lot of sites like MySpace with little or no context that make up a huge % of Google's non-search page views.

Google serves ads there largely based on context from previous pages you visited. For instance, if you searched on Google for "digital camera" and then later went to YouTube, they might show you ads for digital cameras.

Many big ad networks do this. Browsers blocking that would greatly lower CPMs.

So the browser stops supporting cookies does it? Even if the browser does stop sending cookies to google, they could do pretty good tracking based on useragent/ip.

However, a browser that doesn't support cookies correctly, isn't very useful.

The browsers history is completely irrelevant.

From the article: "others using the same computer will not be able to see which sites have been accessed."

That is not the same as "Cookies sent from google will no longer work"

It supports cookies just fine. It just doesn't send your info to every third party site that has a pixel on the page.

Now for Google to track you as you move around the web, they'll have to do a lot more than simply give people a JS snippet to slap in their pages. That's the point. It won't make it impossible for them, but it could make it impractical.

The article probably didn't explain it so well because it was aimed at a non-technical audience.

"It supports cookies just fine. It just doesn't send your info to every third party site that has a pixel on the page."

Look. Either it does, or it doesn't. Either the cookie that google told the browser about is sent back to google as defined in the RFC, or it is not.

"It just doesn't send your info to every third party site that has a pixel on the page."

What info?? The cookie that was previously set by the 3rd party site?

You seem to be muddily suggesting that cookies will be disabled for any images/js/xhr etc inside a page. That would make a ton of websites unusable in any event.

The whole point is moot anyway, as you can track users pretty accurately without using cookies.

It supports normal first party cookie use, but easily blocks third-party cookies. This prevents people like Google from using their own cookies on third party sites.

So right now when you go to, say, autoblog (supposing it uses Google) Google reads some cookie they gave you to figure out who you are, and stores in a db that you went there. Then when you go to Myspace, they read the cookie again, look it up in the db, and know to serve you an ad for cars.

If MSFTs feature were enabled by default, this would be blocked. They could, of course, workaround it somehow, but could they do so while still making installation of Adsense for autoblog as easy as tossing in some js code? That's the threat.

If you want a more detailed technical explanation than I'm capable of giving you, I'm sure you can Google it :)

Yeah I don't think google will need to work too hard to fix that one :/

Unless MS removes even more standards support from the browser like disabling dom methods from js, you'll always be able to toss in some js.

Also it would mean that statcounters, certain iframe login mechanisms etc would be broken in IE.

It'd be pretty cool if IE does become crippled in this way though, less IE users == less headaches.