REDMOND, WA — Although Microsoft probably doesn’t like the nickname that already has stuck like pet hair to a feature in the latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8, it’s an indication of just how pervasive adult entertainment has become on the Web. The new feature, nicknamed “porn mode,” allows users to prevent any traces of their Web-browsing habits from being stored on their computers.Officially the feature is called InPrivate Browsing, and reviewers are cautiously optimistic that in addition to hiding covert surfing operations from prying eyes, it will help surfers foil online advertisers who monitor their habits on competitors’ sites in order to target advertising more precisely. The broader goal is to allow surfers to avoid embarrassment and profiling by covering their tracks.

“The larger challenge here is notifying users clearly about what sites they’re disclosing information to and enabling them to control that disclosure if they choose,” a Microsoft representative said in a June blog posting. For Microsoft, privacy means “the user is in control of what information the browser makes available to websites.”

By and large, reviewers have responded positively to InPrivate Browsing and its companion, InPrivate Blocking. The latter prevents third-party content from appearing on websites surfers visit, thereby thwarting advertisers who collect and share surfers’ data without their consent. The feature may be a response to Microsoft’s opposition to Google’s acquisition of advertising network DoubleClick, which employs proprietary technology to track and profile surfers, although InPrivate Blocking currently also blocks third-party ads from Microsoft’s own advertising platform.

“Don’t be put off by the snickering stories,” Seattle Times technology columnist Brier Dudley wrote on Thursday. “This is a great feature for anyone who is uncomfortable with the Big Brotherish level of user tracking that online ad companies do nowadays. That stealthy monitoring is the obscenity everyone encounters on the Web.

“It won’t satisfy privacy fanatics who have more complex ways to mask themselves online, but IE 8 will make it easier for average users to have more control over their browsing privacy. This is long overdue.”

How InPrivate Blocking will function over the long haul remains to be seen, as such a development is guaranteed to set the online advertising industry — which the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently estimated generates more than $21.1 billion in revenue annually — scrambling to overcome it in short order.

IE 8 Beta 2 also allows users to delete cookies selectively, thereby preventing the annoying but security preserving cookie-deletion side effect of having to re-enter usernames and passwords when encountering a membership site again. In Google’s case, the likely response will be to adjust the code underlying Google Toolbar in order to bookmark Google’s advertising partners automatically. Google Toolbar already allows users to opt to save their browsing history within Google Toolbar in addition to saving it within IE.

Security features in IE 8 do not stop with the InPrivate suite. The browser also highlights Web pages’ main URLs so surfers can see at a glance whether they’ve been hijacked by a phisher.

InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking put IE 8 ahead of competing products like Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari, although many other features in the new beta version represent Microsoft’s attempt to catch up. One such feature is an “accelerator” that allows users to highlight words on a Web page and receive context-sensitive search, translation and mapping help. Another is the significant increase in speed with which pages load in IE 8, bringing the Microsoft browser into line with Firefox’s much-appreciated alacrity in that regard.

The new IE also now closes only the affected window or tab when a Web page crashes, thereby sparing users the aggravation of having to start rounding up pages from scratch in the middle of a large research or entertainment project. Crashed tabs automatically attempt to reload. In the case of a catastrophic browser crash (and because IE 8 is a Microsoft product, such possibilities exist) — or in the event a surfer closes a tab with which he suddenly realizes he wasn’t finished after all — opening a new blank tab in the browser provides the option of displaying a list of all recently visited Web pages, making returning to the scene of the crime much easier than it has been in the past.
And speaking of tabbed browsing… Now related tabs are color-coded. When a user opens a new tab from a link in an open page, the current tab and the new tab are colored to match. The feature is called Groups.

Another welcome change is the ability to delete mistyped and no-longer-needed URLs from the browser’s history and Favorites simply by clicking on a red “X” that appears next to the URL in the “auto-complete” suggestions that drop down when one begins to enter a website address. Related to that is IE 8’s new ability to auto-complete a URL based on the website’s name or words used in its meta-description. This is helpful for those of us who can remember our favorite website is nicknamed ZYX or contains the latest gossip about Brad Pitt but can’t remember the 100-character URL that just barely relates to the nickname and doesn’t mention Pitt at all.

For RSS feed junkies, IE 8 offers Web Slices, which give users the ability to follow items of particular interest on parts of Web pages without subscribing to massive feeds from news, shopping and blogging sites.

IE 8 Beta 2 illustrates just how good for consumers competition can be. Prior to the 2004 launch of Firefox, Microsoft owned more than 90 percent of the browser market. Today, IE claims only 73-percent of the market, with Firefox gaining ground and increasing its 19-percent share almost daily, largely because Mozilla responded quickly and decisively to user desires and concerns. Analysts predict Microsoft will regain some lost territory with IE 8 because it incorporates some of the Firefox features of which users are most fond.

IE 8 Beta 2 was released August 27th and is available for download at Microsoft’s website. The alpha version is due in November.