If you already run IE, this minor upgrade will keep you up-to-date, but there's no need to upgrade immediately. If you're a Netscape 6.1 fan, don't bother to switch.
At the height of the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape, the competing companies released new browser versions one after another. Recently, the war has been downgraded to a minor skirmish. It's been almost a year since Netscape released version 6 of its browser, and Microsoft is only now shipping Internet Explorer 6. Unlike Netscape 6, however (and its update, the much improved 6.1), IE 6 is not a complete overhaul. This incremental upgrade offers just enough new gizmos--including improved privacy features--to keep an IE user from switching to Netscape 6.x, but its interface remains relatively unchanged. Just about the only reason we can figure that it even deserves the full 6 version number is its release in conjunction with Windows XP. For those of you not upgrading to Windows XP, whether you run IE 5.x or Netscape 6.x, there's no need to rush for this download.
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Cut those cookies
Fire up IE 6, and you'll hardly notice the difference from IE 5.x; Microsoft has made very few visible changes. Compared to radically overhauled Netscape 6.x, in fact, IE 6's interface looks downright boring. The most significant of IE 6's new features work behind the scenes to keep your personal browsing habits private. Thankfully, they also put IE's Internet privacy features on a par with Netscape 6's powerful privacy tools.
For example, like Netscape 6, IE 6 now lets you choose whether to accept or reject cookies--little text files that Web sites store on your PC so that they can identify you when you visit again--from individual Web sites. Most sites use cookies to personalise your browsing or shopping experience. (For example, Amazon.com uses cookies to show you personalised book suggestions.)And many Web media sites (including ZDNet.com) use cookies to track which pages you've viewed in the site to get a better idea of what type of content is popular with Web surfers. Other sites, however, use cookies to build profiles of your Web-surfing and shopping habits, which they can then use to tailor ads and marketing campaigns to your preferences. In other words, it pays to be able to decide exactly which sites you trust and want to accept cookies from.
To set your cookie preferences, click the Tools > Internet Options menu and select the Privacy tab. In the resulting dialog box, you can choose whether to accept or reject all third-party cookies (those set by ad-serving sites that can track you as you browse across multiple Web sites). In a different dialog box, IE lets you get even more specific by entering individual sites and telling IE to either accept or reject cookies from each site.
You can also configure IE to prompt you every time a site tries to set a cookie. Since IE version 4.x, the browser simply let you accept or reject the cookie. IE 6, however, like Netscape 6, lets you tell IE to remember whether or not you chose to accept this particular cookie and apply the same choice for this particular Web site whenever you visit. That way, you won't be prompted again to make a choice for that Web site. If you change your mind, simply return to the cookie dialog box (called "Per site privacy actions") and change the cookie setting there. We like this depth of control, but it's inconvenient that it takes so many different dialog boxes to get the job done.
Intruder alert
While these cookie configuration options basically mirror Netscape 6.x's offerings, IE 6 actually one-ups the competition when it comes to reporting privacy violations. If you configure IE to block certain third-party cookies and the Web site you're browsing tries to set one of those cookies, a privacy icon shows up in the bottom frame of the browser window. Double-click the icon to get a privacy report that tells you which sites tried to set prohibited cookies. It can be eye-opening to set IE 6 to block all third-party cookies and then see how many sites try to plant cookies on your system. (ZDNet.com uses third-party cookies as part of its ad-serving system.)
Ever-ready multimedia players
Other than the cookie-management features, IE's only significant new feature is the Media Bar. This Explorer Bar (similar to Netscape's Sidebar feature) is basically the same one we saw in Preview Release 2 of IE 6. Click the icon in the toolbar, and out pops the Media Bar; click the icon again to make it disappear. When it's open, the Media Bar takes up the left-hand side of the browser and lets you play streaming audio and video without having to pop open a separate browser window. This way, you can surf to other Web pages while continuing to listen to or watch a media stream within the Media Bar. The arrangement works quite well for audio files, but, unfortunately, IE scales down video files so that they fit within the Media Bar's narrow frame, making them so small that they're difficult to watch.
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