The Trustworthiness of Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8's first beta release back in March shed some light on the general direction in which Microsoft plans on taking its browser going forward. IE's General Manager, Dean Hachamovitch, released some high-level details yesterday regarding his team's approach to deliver what he calls "trustworthy browsing." The framework is broken out into four main areas - security, privacy, reliability, and business practices.

The security features included in IE7 such as Protected Mode, anti-phishing protection, and support for EV certificates are certainly nothing to sneeze at. There is definitely room for improvement here, however. "Security is often where the trust discussion begins," said Hachamovitch on the company's IEBlog. "We have done even more security work in IE8 to address the evolving threat environment."

In the area of privacy, special attention is being paid to the disclosure of user information to third-party sites. According to Hachamovitch, "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. As we talk more about privacy, we will broaden the discussion to include additional protections from sharing information that the browser can offer users." It is good to see Microsoft adopting this state of mind, since gaining privacy is no longer as simple as clearing your browsing history so others can't see where you've been. Most of us share sensitive information with banking, shopping, and social sites, among others, on a daily basis and the Web browser is our first line of defense against information thieves.

Concerning reliability, Hachamovitch's description is much simpler and to the point. "We define reliability to mean 'as the user browses the web, the browser performs well and does not terminate unexpectedly'. End-users really don't care about the cause of instability in the system... they just want the browser to work." Hear, hear! The final item discussed was business practices which, in IE8's case, seem to revolve around user choice and flexibility. Hachamovitch made some interesting, albeit rather vague, statements regarding this area. Some of his thoughts may even seem a bit "anti-Microsoft", but such is the way in today's competitive environment. Key business practices that the IE team believes in include respecting the user’s choice of search engine, explicitly asking them before installing a new version, and acknowledging that a user has the right to choose their own system defaults. Only time will tell if Microsoft continues in this direction with its browser. At the very least, it is refreshing to hear them take this stance for now.

Internet Explorer Beta 1 is currently available for download as a developer preview. Beta 2 is due out sometime in August.