Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

Features of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0

The most significant of IE 6's new features work behind the scenes to keep your personal browsing habits private. Thankfully, they also put IE's Internet privacy features on a par with Netscape 6's powerful privacy tools.





For example, like Netscape 6, IE 6 now lets you choose whether to accept or reject cookies--little text files that Web sites store on your PC so that they can identify you when you visit again--from individual Web sites. Most sites use cookies to personalize your browsing or shopping experience. (For example, Amazon.com uses cookies to show you personalized book suggestions.) And many Web media sites, including CNET.com, use cookies to track which pages you've viewed on the site to get a better idea of what type of content is popular with Web surfers. Other sites, however, use cookies to build profiles of your Web surfing and shopping habits, which they then use to tailor ads and marketing campaigns to your preferences. In other words, it pays to be able to decide exactly which sites you trust and want to accept cookies from.

To set your cookie preferences, click the Tools > Internet Options menu and select the Privacy tab. In the resulting dialog box, you can choose whether to accept or reject all third-party cookies (those set by ad-serving sites that can track you as you browse across multiple Web sites). In a different dialog box, IE lets you get even more specific by entering individual sites and telling IE to either accept or reject cookies from each site.

You can also configure IE to prompt you every time a site tries to set a cookie. Ever since IE version 4.x, the browser simply has let you accept or reject the cookie. IE 6, however, like Netscape 6, lets you tell IE to remember whether you chose to accept this particular cookie and apply the same choice for this particular Web site whenever you visit. That way, you won't be prompted again to make a choice for that Web site. If you change your mind, simply return to the cookie dialog box (called "Per site privacy actions") and change the cookie setting there. We like this depth of control, but it's inconvenient that it takes so many different dialog boxes to get the job done.





While these cookie configuration options basically mirror Netscape 6.x's offerings, IE 6 actually one-ups the competition when it comes to reporting privacy violations. If you configure IE to block certain third-party cookies and the Web site you're browsing tries to set one of those cookies, a privacy icon shows up in the bottom frame of the browser window. Double-click the icon to get a privacy report that tells you which sites tried to set prohibited cookies. It can be eye-opening to set IE 6 to block all third-party cookies and see how many sites try to plant cookies on your system. (CNET.com uses third-party cookies as part of its ad-serving system.)

In version 5.5, IE finally introduced a Print Preview feature. In IE 6, the Print Preview window sports a new drop-down menu that lets you select whether to print an entire Web page, just a selected frame, or all frames individually (one per page). IE 5.5 offered this basic function from the print dialog box but hadn't integrated it into the Print Preview feature; it's a nice touch if you'd like to print, say, an online newspaper article without a lot of pesky ads (provided, of course, that the ads are in a different frame).