How To Activate In-Private Browsing Mode in IE

Your search history within the browser could easily communicate where and at what time you have been browsing the internet. It is like leaving remnants of information about your browsing activities by your browser on your device's hard drive.

This history does not only include the websites or webpages you might have visited but also carries with it the cache, cookies, or any saved passwords, etc. The whole purpose of saving this data is to enhance your browsing experience shortly, in the manner of faster load time and providing you with pre-populated web forms.

Although very convenient, your search history can intrude on your privacy and comes with certain inherent security risks, especially when you are browsing from a device that is not yours or public.

To protect your privacy and sensitive private data, you can use the InPrivate mode in Internet Explorer. With internet explorer 11 or IE 11, you can protect your private data easily and efficiently. It ensures that none of your private data is stored by the browser once your browsing session expires.

It is not only the data, but the InPrivate mode also ensures that no cookies, or cache (temporary internet files), or any other private component are saved by the browser in the device's hard drive.

Everything from your browsing history, any saved passwords or auto-filled forms, is permanently erased, once you close the current browsing session. Here is how you can activate the InPrivate mode on your Internet Explorer 11:

1. Launch the internet explorer
2. Click on the Gear icon (the action or the tools menu) present at the upper-right hand corner of the browser window
3. A drop-down menu will be displayed, go to the Safety option present in this drop-down menu list
4. The same will now display a sub-menu, you will see an option InPrivate Browsing, click on this item

This will enable the InPrivate Browsing mode in your Internet Explorer 11. You can also use the following keyboard shortcut the enable the InPrivate Browsing mode, CTRL + SHIFT + P

Once enabled, a new browsing window will now open with an indicator called the InPrivate indicator, present in the IE11’s address bar. Now while surfing the web in the InPrivate Browsing mode, the following conditions will apply or affect on:

1. Cookies: a cookie is kind of a small text file that is saved on your hard drive. This file aims to store user-specific settings and other user-specific unique information. All such cookies are then utilized by their parent websites, and the data is then used to provide a customized browsing experience.

But when in InPrivate mode, all these cookies and data that were stored by them will be deleted from your hard-drive as soon as you close a particular window. This also includes the DOM or the Document Object Model storage, also known as the super cookies.

2. Form Data: whenever filling up a form, all the information that you have entered such as the name, address, phone number, etc. everything was under normal conditions stored by your IE11, to be used in the future. But when using the InPrivate mode, no such data is stored or saved by the IE.
3. Crash Restoration: normally the IE11 will store a particular session especially in the event of a crash so that it can recover everything as soon as you relaunch the browser. But in the case of InPrivate mode, you will lose this entire data. And nothing will be recovered.
4. Temporary internet files: also known as the cache files, these basically consist of images, various multimedia files, or even entire web pages. The purpose as to why the cache is stored is to speed up the load time. But again when you are browsing in via the InPrivate mode, all such files are immediately deleted or removed as soon as you close a particular tab.
5. Browsing history: your browsing history will never be recorded when browsing in the InPrivate mode of IE 11.

6. AutoComplete: the AutoComplete feature of IE11 uses both your previous browsing and search history, to make an educated guess of the URL the moment you start to type something. And with InPrivate mode, this data is not stored at all.
7. Form Data:  all the information that you might have entered in a web-form would under normal conditions be stored by the IE11, to be used in the future. But no such information is stored by the IE when its InPrivate mode is enabled.
8. RSS Feeds: the only thing that you need to manually delete while browsing in the InPrivate mode is the RSS Feeds. If you want, you will have to manually delete all such individual entries.
9. Favorites: whenever you create a bookmark or a favorite while browsing in the InPrivate mode, nothing will be deleted even when you end the browsing session by closing all the tabs. Instead, all such favorites or bookmarks can be accessed or viewed in the standard browsing mode also. Hence you will have to delete them manually if you want to remove them.

Enable the InPrivate Filtering Mode in Internet Explorer 8:

If using internet explorer 8 instead of internet explorer 11, you don’t have the option of InPrivate Browsing, but IE 8 gives you the option of InPrivate Filtering Mode, with which you can actually filter your browsing history.

To enable the InPrivate Filtering in IE 8:

1. Launch internet explorer 8
2. Click on the Safety button, present on the internet explorer toolbar
3. From here choose the InPrivate Filtering Settings
4. From here you can also choose the level of blocking, like choose the InPrivate Filtering to Automatically Block any site that is using content from other sites that you have previously used or you can choose to Manually Block, a few selected sites
5. Click on OK to finally save your settings

If you don’t wish to use the InPrivate Filtering Mode, you can also clear your entire browsing history manually, by using the Ctrl+Shift+Delete