14 DAY TRIAL // With the advent of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft introduced a feature designed to allow end users to easily hide their browsing history from people sharing the same computer. However, even though IE8 came with the promise of complete browsing privacy, components intimately connected with the browser, such as Adobe Flash Player were still collecting and storing data, irrespective of the fact that users had opted for the contrary. That is no longer the case with the latest update for Flash.
By activating InPrivate Browsing, IE8 users could navigate to any website they wanted without the browser keeping any sort of data as to the locations they visited. The default behavior for all browsers is to store a plethora of information including cookies, favorites, temporary Internet files, history, form saved data, passwords etc. All of the saved information makes it possible to re-trace the browsing history of users. IE8’s InPrivate Browsing mode made sure that no data would be collected from browsing sessions. As of version 10.1, Adobe Flash also supports the InPrivate feature of IE8.
“Version 10.1 of Flash will now respond to interfaces we built into IE8 when we first released it. When you browse to a site with Flash, it can store “Flash Cookies”, which are files created by Flash that websites can use to store data. Now, just like your IE history and cookies, these Flash objects will be deleted when you close your InPrivate Browsing window,” revealed Andy Zeigler, IE program manager.
Essentially, users that navigate the web with IE8, but also Firefox 3.5+ and Google Chrome 1.0+ will have all their browsing history deleted, including Flash data, once they’re done with a particular browsing session which is run in private mode. “Starting with Flash Player 10.1, Flash Player actively supports the browser's private browsing mode, managing data in local storage so that it is consistent with private browsing. So when a private browsing session ends, Flash Player will automatically clear any corresponding data in local storage,” revealed Adobe’s Jimson Xu.
“We’re really happy to see Flash adopt our InPrivate Browsing feature, and happy to see that they’ve also supported private browsing in Firefox and Chrome as well. Great job Flash team,” Zeigler added.
Internet Explorer 8 is available for download here.
Opera 10.50 Beta is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 for Linux is available for download here.
The latest releases of Google Chrome are available for download here.