Using the Seamless Web in Windows 8 : Securing Your Browsing Experience

One new security feature in IE10 is Enhanced Protected mode, which isolates the website content that appears in each tab. Now InPrivate browsing is also segregated per tab, so your browsing is more secure and private than ever.

>>>step-by-step: Deleting Cookies

It’s a good idea in the desktop version of IE10 to regularly clean off the cookies that have accumulated on your computer, both to keep their drain on your computer’s memory low and to weed out any potentially sneaky cookies that could be sending information back to the site that placed them.

1. In the desktop version of IE10, tap or click Tools. The Tools list appears.

2. Point to Safety.

3. Select Delete Browsing History. The Delete Browsing History dialog box appears.

4. The first item in the dialog box, Preserve Favorites Website Data, retains information—cookies and all—related to sites that you have marked as Favorites. In most cases, you should leave this item selected.

5. Review the list of checked and unchecked items. The checked items are deleted; the unchecked items are not. Change the items as needed to suit your preference. You may, for example, want to delete all the form data you have entered in online forms; if so, check the Form Data check box.

6. Click or tap Delete to delete the cookies and other information you’ve selected.

>>> Go Further: So What are Cookies, Anyway?

The websites you visit want you to come back (and buy something—from them or one of their advertisers), so they want you to have a personalized experience on their site. This means they want to make visiting their site a pleasant experience for you, so they save information about your time on the site—your preferences, your username and password, if you created them—in what’s known as a cookie, and the cookie is stored on your computer. Then, whenever you return to that site, your preferences are there to personalize your web experience with the items you said you like. Pretty clever, right?

But some cookies can do more than save your preferences. They may also track your web activities, and that borders on infringing upon your privacy. In Internet Explorer 10, you can control the cookies stored on your computer by deleting them, limiting them, or blocking all of them.