Use Private Browsing Mode

All the popular (updated) web browsers all now support a private browsing mode. In Firefox, you can access it by pressing Control+Shift+P, Chrome Control+Shift+N, and the dreaded Internet Explored Control+Shift+P. If you are planning on doing some searches you don’t really want traced, it is highly recommend that you use these modes.

Manually Clear Your Browser History

If you don’t have the latest browser that has a Private Browsing Mode, please upgrade. Otherwise remember to clear all your history manually once you are done. Depending on your browser, you will most likely find it under the tools section. If you downloaded, or saved any files onto your hard drive, make sure you delete them too as it won’t be deleted through this step.

Check What’s Running

It’s also a good idea to check what’s running on your computer, you never know, someone may have installed a keylogger or another program on your computer that records what you do. I recommended downloading and running HiJackThis which performs a scan and outputs a text file. Upload it to http://www.hijackthis.de to see if it reveals any nasties.

Check MSCONFIG

Another check you can do is MSCONFIG. This basically shows you a list of programs and services that load when your computer boots. Disable anything you don’t practically need or anything that looks a little suss. Not only it stops programs running during startup, it makes your computer boot a lot quicker.

To access MSCONFIG, simply type it in on the run command on start menu search box.

Check Your Router Or Network

Some routers also record the history and URL of sites on your network visit. So if your router has logging capabilities, ensure that it is switched off. Also, programs such as Wireshark can be used to see what’s inside packets being sent along your network (in case you want to sniff what’s in your packets – you can even find out passwords!).

Check The Actual Website

If you are using Google to search for something, make sure that you (or someone else) are not logged in. Because if there account has Google Web History turned on, anything that you search, click, and visit will be recorded – so just a word of warning.

Use A Virtual Box

If you really want to hide what you do on the computer, install a Virtual Machine. For example, download Virtual Box, install Ubuntu on it, and you have your own private PC.
Make sure you also password protect the user account.

In the end….

If you don’t want people to find what you have been search for, the majority of the time, you probably shouldn’t be searching for it in the first place.

I hope that you have found some of these tips useful in protecting what you do online. If you want some further reading, I have written a few posts on my own personal blog about how you can protect your personal identify online and how you can protect yourself while using Facebook, Gmail, and other websites that you may want to check out, which I strongly suggest that you do.

Do you have other tips you would like to share? We at techAU would like to know.

Microsoft’s IE9 has reached release candidate status today. There’s some nice updates available in RC over that of the beta. Visually the tabs have been revamped and squared off, which results in an overall cleaner UI.

Tabs
Along with the buzz cut square corners, tabs can now be placed on a row of their own. This allows you more screen real estate for those of us who get a little crazy with the number of simultaneous tabs. Something that frustrated me in the beta was that you couldn’t actually tear of a new tab into its own window on the about:tabs page, you actually had to enter an address before doing so. This has been fixed in IE9 RC.

Improved JavaScript Engine Performance
There’s also improved JavaScript engine performance, given that JS power a lot of today’s web, this is an very important focus area. Perceived ‘slowness’ of computer these days is often tied to the work we do on the web and while connection dependent, scripts are often the culprit of bad performing websites.

Dynamic GPU Usage
File this feature under the ‘freaking neat’ category, IE9 RC intelligently switched between hardware accelerated GPU rendering and software based rendering based on computer specs. This means you’ll be getting the best performance possibly without lifting a finger.

Standards
As you’d likely expect, there’s improved HTML5 and CSS3 support in the RC build.

Geolocation
Websites can now use the Geolocation API to tap into users location (with their permission of course) for use with maps or check-in services like Facebook, Foursquare etc.

WebM support
Internet Explorer 9 RC now supports playback of H.264-encoded video using the HTML5 video tag and now Google’s WebM video format.

IE9 definitely seems faster than the beta and a quick test of a few sites I knew had issues, or required compatibility mode, seem to work much better. Microsoft are obviously keen to get as many people trying out the IE9 RC as possible, they have sponsored tweets about ‘Internet Explorer’, linking to the RC download.

Internet Explorer 9 RC is available from http://beautyoftheweb.com

Microsoft have just posted a juicy piece of information to fuel the browser war fire. Internet Explorer 9, still in beta, has been downloaded more than 20 Million times. A lot of the market share IE9 now occupies has been taken from previous versions of Internet Explorer.

In 2010, IE6 and IE7 use dropped over 40% and now only accounts for 22.98% of users worldwide. If your still using IE6, please do yourself a favour and update, security alone should be enough motivation. Everyday web developers are dropping support for IE6, so chances are your web experience is pretty broken, again, update now.

As for IE9, it launched on September 15th 2010 and now holds nearly 0.46% of web users. A relatively low percentage, highlighting just how many of us are online. Internet Explorer 9 will be released in the first half 2011, but expect IE9 beta 2 soon.

More @ WindowsTeamBlog

I feel bad for the Opera team, they just keep on trying, release after release to gain traction and just seem to spin their wheels. While market penetration has never really been a strong point for Opera, fans of the browser swear by it and are extremely loyal.

So while Firefox 4, Chrome 9, IE9 and Safari 6 are all in development, Opera holds the crown for the highest browser version number. Does this many iterations mean its the best browser ? No. In recent revisions its been there or there abouts when compared to the alternatives, but a couple of unique features hasn’t been enough.

This time round it actually seems like they are going against the grain of simplification by adding a complicated Menu in the top left, and a toolbar at the bottom. It does use Windows 7 Aero, but my money is still on IE9 in the browser wars.

More @ Opera via NeoWin

Microsoft have just officially unveiled and released the IE9 Beta. You can grab the beta bits from http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

This mornings IE9 beta release event was streamed live and will be made available for download later today. Keep an eye on Microsoft.com if your interested in the full run down. The event essentially ran as expected, just highlighting the new features, surprisingly Microsoft tweeted the download location before the slide was revealed

The download and installation of IE9 can take a while, its clear IE9 hooks pretty deep into Windows with a post shut-down installation required, restart, then further configuration before being able to get hands-on. After early testing, the wait is certainly worth it. Lets take a look at the new features in IE9.

Clean UI
Microsoft have opted for a very clean and minimalisatic design has clearly been a focus for IE9. The end result is a very slick UI that works even better when maximized.

Tear off tabs (w/Aero snap)

A feature dual-monitor users have been waiting for in the past 2 releases of IE has finally arrived – tear off tabs. This was a must-have feature for me to be able to switch, its something I use many, many times a day. IE9’s implementation is actually better than other browsers as its the only one you can tear off tab and aero snap in one click. While it may seem like a small differentiation, I can assure this is an important efficiency.

Awesome bar
First introduced in Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9 has updated to a single combined search and address bar. This saves space and helps simplify the UI. It functions much the same as Chrome, with one exception, you can click to opt-in to get live web results as you type, as well as searching through favorites and history.

Websites in your Start Menu / Taskbar

A brand new feature in IE9 is the ability to add website shortcuts in both your start menu and your Taskbar. Your favourite sites are then fully searchable through Start Menu search. Interestingly when launched from these shortcuts, the browser window is slightly customised to match the specific site. As you’ll see below, the favicon for the site is displayed on the left, while the colour of the new Back/Forward buttons is influenced by the colours in that logo.

Choose Add-ons
According to Microsoft, Add-ins are responsible for 70% of browser crashes, so they’ve come up with a way to manage them easily in IE9. The ‘Choose Add-ons’ control panel not only indicates which are installed, but how long each of these are impacting on the browser startup time. After disabling a couple, improvements were noticeable, this is a pretty clean system, I’m sure many others have lots more to clean up.

Saved Password
Something IE has traditionally done very poorly is remember passwords for site. Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook all seem to be saving passwords so far, but this will need testing over a long period of time to confirm for sure, but looks like they may have finally fixed this long running issue in IE.

New tab page

Below is the new tab page and while it borrows strongly from Chrome’s offering it has one glaring omission – Pinned tiles. IE9 now lets you see your most frequented sites, however it’d be nice to be able to pin some of these so they’re always available. Sure the sites like Facebook that you always go to will show up as IE9 learns your common browsing habbits, but what if there’s sites that you don’t visit frequently, but still want convenient access to ? Chrome handles this much better, allowing users to simply pin any of the new tab tiles to keep them in place.

New Download Manager
IE9’s download manager has been improved significantly over that of IE8. There’s the ability to cue multiple downloads, track speeds, search, pause and resume downloads all from the one clean window. This is clearly ‘borrowed’ from other modern browsers, good to see IE catch up in this area.

Issues

One of the first of only a couple of issues I noticed in IE9 was the lack of Jump List support in the 64-bit version. Admittedly not a huge issue considering most people will run the 32-bit version and Jump Lists work just fine there.

Another issue I’ve discovered is the rendering of headings on techAU.tv in IE9. There’s obviously something very strange about the theme / how IE9 renders it, because story titles, simply don’t display. I’d ask all IE9 beta users to simply click the compatibility button until I work on a fix ASAP.

IE9 beta using new rendering engine

IE9 beta using compatibility mode

Unfortunately Microsoft have decided to leave the pretty terrible Favorites management in place. To add a site to your favorites is still a 3-step process. Something they certainly should have copied from Chrome is the ability to simply click the Favorite icon in the address bar.

Crashes
Yes this is beta software so there’s bound to be some stability issues. IE9 generally recovers pretty well from a crash, but in the couple of hours I’ve been running IE9, I’ve had a few crashes. Testing has only been on one system so far, so a more detailed report of IE9’s stability can only be gained over a number of systems over a longer period of time. Despite these IE9 has already become my new default browser, sorry Chrome.

Earlier today Boy Genius Report posted a new leaked video showing off the current unreleased UI for IE9. We seen a screen shot a couple weeks back leak out, but this is the first video of the UI. The UI in the video differs slightly from the leaked screen, as the back button is no longer pronounced, but the forward and back buttons are the same as IE8. This means one of two things.. either the design team decided to pull back from the new design, or that this build is an earlier one.

This is clearly still a development build as the video runs through various IE9 demos we’ve seen before in preview builds and scores 95/100 on the ACID 3 test. 95 is the same score the IE9 preview platform 4 build scored. It is expected that IE9 will score 100/100 by final release.

Update
The video source is actually from the site – http://iebest.com which claims it is indeed a beta build. One thing we don’t see shown in the video is breakout tabs like Chrome. This feature is supposed to be included in the IE9 beta.

IE9 beta is due out, complete with UI, on September 15th. Not long to get hands on for ourselves, you can be sure there’ll be plenty of coverage on techAU the day of the beta launch.

More @ BGR

Microsoft have released an update (as they promised they would) to the IE9 preview released earlier this year. There’s a number of underlying changes that result in improvements to performance and compatibility.

One high profile test is the ACID 3 test. IE9 preview 1 scored 55/100, in preview 2 this has increased to 68/100 so there’s progress being made. There’s also a bunch of new samples to show off the upgrades.

There’s still no serious UI, so don’t expect to be using this browser day-to-day, most importantly there’s not even a back button or shortcut. After testing a bunch of sites, it does seem incredibly responsive. This is likely due to the IE9’s javascript performance approaching that of the superfast market leader Chrome 5.0 beta.

The future looks bright for IE9, if Microsoft get it right, it should stem flow away from IE towards alternatives like Chrome (my browser of choice) and bring performance browsing to the masses.

More @ Windows Team Blog

Download @ IE9 Test Drive

If you like living on the cutting edge (like me), you’ll already be running the latest developer builds of Google Chrome. Something that’s been lacking in Chrome is the ability to extend the browser’s default functionality via extensions. Good news – Extensions are here!

Whilst the offerings right now available @ http://www.chromeextensions.org/ aren’t exactly earth shattering, this will only grow over time as more developers get on board.

The platform itself works quite well, with extensions installed seamlessly with no browser restarts required. The extensions interface allows easy control over your installed plugins – enable, disable and uninstall.

The good news is (so far) extensions don’t seem to have a negative effect on Chrome’s performance.

More @ Lifehacker

Today we’ve received yet another browser update, this time it’s not IE, Firefox or even Chrome, but rather Apple’s Safari. It’s currently still in beta, but arrives with a bunch of new features appears to be quite stable.

New Features

Top Sites – Not unlike Opera’s home screen, Safari 4 offers a 3D wall of your most commonly used sites. This view can be customized to contain 6, 16 or 24 thumbnails. Users can also pin a site to ensure it remains in the Top Sites view.

Tabs – While tabs are not new to Safari, the way they’re handled is. They’ve now got the chrome-esc above the address bar look. Even better they’ve also picked up the ability to drag tabs from one Safari window to another. This is a great feature especially when viewing 2 windows side by side in Windows 7. As normal these days, tabs can be re-ordered.

Before

After

Coverflow History – Borrowing from iTunes, Safari now uses the Coverflow to Safari’s history. This provides a preview of the website in your history, so if your a heavy browser, finding a site you’ve been to in the past should be all that much easier. 

Unfortunately the Bookmarks don’t go and grab a thumbnail of the site, this should be fixed before the final version.

Full page zooming – Another feature that’s been around in IE since version 7, Safari have added zoom not only to the text, but to the full page. This means the layout isn’t broken when zooming.

Overall there are some changes in Safari 4, but pay no attention to Apple’s claimed 150 features. What they call a feature is mostly fixing things and borrowing features from the existing browsers.

There’s a full list of the “new” features, over at Apple.com. Safari 4 beta is available for Mac or Windows.

Supporting a slick new interface Opera 9.5 has an number of new features..

• More than 2x faster than Opera 9.2 in rendering JavaScript and HTML
• Faster handling of third party plug-ins
• Much faster start up time
• Superior support for Web standards (css3, html5 +more)

For all the updates check out the full list.

Overall I’m most impressed by the new tab bar (above) and the new Speed Dial interface when creating a new tab. This lets you create shortcuts to your most common links, so it makes sense that when your opening a new tab, there’s a good chance you could be visiting one of your commonly-used sites. Once setup, simply click the auto generated thumbnail for the site you wish to visit, then the desired site opens in the active tab.

Currently I had created a ‘commonly used links’ site that was my default home page, for this very reason. I actually like Opera’s interpretation of this idea, it allows for very quick updates of these links. Speed improvements are noticeable, especially in comparison to IE or Firefox.

More @ Opera