Inside Microsoft’s internal IE8 privacy battles

A bid by the Internet Explorer team to automatically block the tracking systems used by online advertisers was itself blocked by others within the company in order to protect those advertisers, the Wall Street Journal wrote over the weekend. 

The InPrivate Filter feature, introduced in Internet Explorer 8, could have defaulted to "on." This would result in the tracking scripts used by advertisers such as Google being disabled, and in turn, reduce the ability for those advertisers to target the ads they show.

InPrivate Filtering works by tracking any scripts, images, and other resources that webpages reference. In particular, it tracks resources that come from a different domain than the page being viewed. If one of these resources is used by more than ten different sites, InPrivate Filtering deems that resource to be a tracking device and will block subsequent attempts to download it.

The WSJ story describes how the Internet Explorer group built the feature without consulting other groups in the company who might take an interest in such a change—in particular, Brian McAndrews, who had been CEO of advertising firm aQuantive until Microsoft bought it in 2007. 

McAndrews and others pushed back against the Internet Explorer team and its manager, Dean Hachamovitch, fearing that the feature would damage both Microsoft's own advertising business and its relationships with other advertising firms.

In the end, the marketers largely won the battle. Though InPrivate Filtering is part of Internet Explorer 8, it was scaled back. It is not enabled by default—indeed, it cannot be made to be on by default without modifying the registry—and an advanced subscription feature, one that would enable privacy groups to provide blacklists of companies known to breach privacy, did not ship at all. Lists of privacy offenders can be manually imported, but they can't be updated automatically.

Enabling InPrivate Filtering is not without some risk. Commonly used JavaScript libraries are available from specially created content delivery networks (CDNs) so that Web authors can more easily include them in their pages. Using CDNs in this way allows browsers to cache the scripting libraries and use their cached copies across many different sites, leading to better performance for users. InPrivate Filtering has no way to distinguish between "desirable" scripts like these and "undesirable" ones used for tracking; it is prone to blocking them all.

As such, the decision to disable the feature by default might make sense technically—even if made for quite non-technical reasons.

Read the comments on this post

Etc: The SmartScreen filter in Internet Explorer 8 has now blocked over 1 billion attempts to download malware.

The SmartScreen filter in Internet Explorer 8 has now blocked over 1 billion attempts to download malware.

Read More: The Windows Blog

Read the comments on this post

Etc: Microsoft has kicked off a new advertising campaign for Internet Explorer 8 that underlines how the browser helps stop online criminals from stealing your information.

Microsoft has kicked off a new advertising campaign for Internet Explorer 8 that underlines how the browser helps stop online criminals from stealing your information.

Read More: The Windows Blog

Read the comments on this post

Add-ons responsible for 70 percent of IE8 crashes

In a recently published whitepaper titled "Enhancing the performance of Windows Internet Explorer 8," Microsoft detailed browser add-ons, toolbars, malware, restricted sites, plus more advanced topics such as User Agent String and concurrent download settings. In itself, it's a useful guide for IE8 users who are having trouble with their browser's speed. For our purposes, though, there's some interesting information about add-ons included:

Although browser add-ons can add great new features to your browser, they can also introduce performance issues if written poorly. Add-ons cause most browser crashes, accounting for over 70 percent of Internet Explorer 8's crashes. Slowdowns in Internet Explorer 8 are very often caused by add-ons—especially when you open a new browser window or tab.

Read the comments on this post

Next Page »