The feedback and conversation on IE9’s Platform Previews and Beta to date from many different communities has made the IE9 development process, and product, substantially better than previous releases. The discussions around hardware-accelerated HTML5 and same markup with the developer community, for example, have informed many changes to the product. Thank you for using it and providing feedback.
In general, we’ve focused this blog on engineering issues. In this post, still continuing our pattern of transparency, let’s look at the increasingly important topic of privacy online through the lens of a consumer concerned about being tracked on the web. Here is a brief summary (warning, what follows it is long) of what we intend to deliver in the release candidate of IE9.
Today, consumers have very little awareness or control over who can track their online activity. Much has been written about this topic. With the release candidate:
  1. IE9 will offer consumers a new opt-in mechanism (“Tracking Protection”) to identify and block many forms of undesired tracking.
  2. “Tracking Protection Lists” will enable consumers to control what third-party site content can track them when they’re online.
We believe that the combination of consumer opt-in, an open platform for publishing of Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs), and the underlying technology mechanism for Tracking Protection offer new options and a good balance between empowering consumers and online industry needs.