AP reports on renewed "Browser War"

An anonymous reader writes "CNN and others are reporting an Associated Press story on "the revived browser war" with Mozilla paired against Microsoft. It seems the 1.0 release is creating some waves out there. " Considering most people consider the war long since over, I can't imagine this mattering much.

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Overview of Internet Explorer 6 Privacy Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has enhanced Internet Explorer by adding innovative new privacy features in Internet Explorer 6. One important new feature is how Internet Explorer 6 handles cookie filtering. It is now easier for you to see what Web sites are doing with cookies, view their privacy statements, and manage cookies.
What is a Cookie?

Cookies are small text files that some Web sites create when you visit, and use to store information on your computer. By default, Internet Explorer 6 will not allow the use of cookies from sites you do not navigate to, unless that site has pledged not to use cookies relating to your personal identifying data.

Internet Explorer 6 uses P3P, the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project, an XML-based technology under development from the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). The P3P standard enables Web sites to state their privacy practices in the P3P XML vocabulary. Then P3P-enabled software such as Internet Explorer 6, can act upon those stated practices. Internet Explore 6 implements a portion of the P3P standard that allows the browser to use the P3P encoded privacy statements to compare a site's practices to your user settings, and then decide whether to accept cookies from that site.
Default Privacy Preferences

The default privacy preferences in Internet Explorer 6 automatically restrict cookies that use your personal identifiable information for secondary purposes or to transfer such information to recipients beyond the site you are visiting. However, the default setting does allow sites to use cookies to collect data that may be needed to give to product delivery services.. Because many electronic commerce sites depend on this functionality to fulfill orders, Internet Explorer 6 allows this by default.

When you are surfing the Web in Internet Explorer 6, the privacy icon may appear on your status bar. This indicates that Internet Explorer 6 has taken a privacy protecting action for you because of a cookie Clicking on the icon brings up a privacy report, which displays links to parts of the Web page that can set or receive cookies. This report also displays whether Internet Explorer 6 has blocked or restricted any cookies from that site. Clicking on these links brings up the privacy statements associated with each portion of the Web page. With this information, you can learn what is happening behind the scenes on sites you visit that use cookies. With the privacy report, you can easily manage cookies on a site-by-site basis, choosing to accept or reject them.
Internet Explorer 6 Cookie Settings

Internet Explorer 6 includes six pre-configured cookies settings, which are easy to adjust: Accept All Cookies, Low, Medium, Medium-High, High, and Block All Cookies. You can also create and import your own custom privacy settings in an XML format. These instructions can tell Internet Explorer 6 how to act when it encounters P3P-encoded privacy statements on a Web site.
Learn More

Finally, Internet Explorer 6 has other features that allow you to manage your preferences on cookie handling in greater detail. For more in-depth information about these and other Internet Explorer 6 privacy features, visit MSDN Online. More information about P3P is available from the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) P3P site.

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[Apreche]

95% of surfers use IE because 95% of surfers are AOLers. Remember the number 1 ISP is AOL. IE is only the number one browser because AOL counts as IE. If AOL switches to Mozilla, then the #1 browser becomes Mozilla. I'm at a technical college with lots of computer nerds, and lots of non-nerds too. Since we have a LAN you can get a good idea about what browsers people use without AOL getting in the way. WRONG. Most of the non-nerds USE AOL. That's right, given for free the best ISP in the world, "stupid" people just put AOL over it, because they don't know any better. Other than that it's pretty much a 3 way tie between Mozilla, Netscape Communicator, and IE. There are actually quite a few funky opera users out there.

I personally use IE for most browsing, I have win2k and IE is fast, and it works. I disliked Mozilla because the last time I used it it was very slow. I recently installed 1.0, and am very pleased. Now I use both browsers. IE for my daily site roundup and Mozilla for browsing (pop-up protection is great). My roomate a rabid IE fan even installed Mozilla, he also only uses it when he needs to block pop-ups.

So there is no browser war. AOL just decides which browser is the standard.

And Konqueror is kool too.