Internet Explorer 8 will feature a full-fledged privacy mode which will prevent the browser from saving any browsing or search history, will delete your IE8 browser cache at the end of every session and will also disable saving of cookies, data, passwords and other offline data. The tools share the "InPrivate" name, which Microsoft registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office several weeks ago.

The new beta 2 browser offers significantly improved standards support and developer platform investments with enhanced user experience, Microsoft explained, and hopefully it will crash a lot less too, we might add. Bill Gates is expected to release it this month.

The new browser will include significant security upgrades, such as the SmartScreen Filter, an upgraded version of the phishing filter found in Internet Explorer 7; a set of cross-site scripting defenses to protect the browser against the so-called "reflection" attacks; a number of anti-social engineering features; improvements to ActiveX dialogues and control, and more.

Internet Explorer 8.0 includes three rendering modes: one that is using the current web standards, a second one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006 and a third one based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web. By default, the first mode of rendering will be enabled in Internet Explorer.

In the early phases of the development of Internet Explorer, Microsoft intended to make the second one (IE 7 mode) the default mode in the browser, claiming that it would offer a better backwards-compatibility with existing Web sites and applications.

Microsoft originally developed its flagship Internet browser before Web standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) or Really Simple Syndication (RSS) were released. So, because Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been used for so many years for surfing the Internet and people got accustomed to it, developers tend to write apps to work with IE rather than to support Web standards.