In a post to the Internet Explorer development team's blog yesterday afternoon, Microsoft IE8 program manager Andy Ziegler confirmed news that reporters anticipated after last week's discovery of a series of trademark filings: The new browser will contain a prominent feature enabling users to switch off any kind of permanent or long-term storage of their history or activities.

It's being called "InPrivate," demonstrating the company's newfound ability to claim a self-explanatory trademark. As Ziegler describes it, essentially every tool a common Web site employs to compensate for the absence of "state" in a Web session -- for a Web server's inability to perceive users as "active" or "online" while they're browsing the site -- can be shut off by the user when she doesn't want either Web sites or other people to be able to see what they're doing.

"Perhaps you're using someone else's computer and you don't want them to know which sites you visited," Ziegler wrote. "Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you're at an Internet kiosk and don't want the next person using it to know at which Web site you bank."

Of course, Web retailers and online banks nearly all use some type of cookies to retain session states, and SSL requires the generation of session keys that are maintained throughout these sessions for encrypting the connection. Microsoft's solution, according to Ziegler, is for IE8 to alternatively store this data only for the duration of the session, to be deleted when the session closes or before the browser is exited.

You can read the entire article at BetaNews.