Microsoft’s Latest Browser Packaged with ‘Porn Mode’

This weeks Computer Weekly magazine’s Downtime section has an interesting story:

In what is likely to be better news for men than women, Microsoft’s latest browser, Internet Explorer 8, boasts a feature that allows users to hide the trail of their web browsing.

The feature, predictably nicknamed “porn mode”, stops casual users and, crucially, online advertisers from seeing a browser’s audit trail. This means that advertisers cannot easily target adverts based upon a user’s viewing habits and conversely, advert providers, such as Google’s Adsense, cannot easily reimburse members of their content network since they do not know where the user clicked an advert.