Will IE8 harm Internet advertising?

Microsoft have just released a second beta of the next version of their browser, Internet Explorer 8 .  A new set of features, dubbed "InPrivate"by the company, and designed to protect users’ private information, has already provoked concern amongst Internet advertisers.

One of these features  allows users to wipe clean all traces of their session, including the history of the pages they have visited and the cookies left.  Without cookies, advertisers will be less able to follow the browsing habits of individual surfers in order to target them with ads.

This is not the most controversial feature, however.  The ability for users to block elements coming from pages other than the one they are looking at would stop adverts such as those generated by Google (and Microsoft themselves) on other sites.

It seems that advertisers were far less worried when similar functionality was added to other browsers.  An extension to Firefox, for instance, AdBlock, has performed more or less the same role for several years without generating so much comment as Microsoft’s proposition has within a few months.

But with around 70% of the market-share, a change in the behavior of Microsoft’s browser is a different story.  If most of Internet Explorer’s users turn on the InPrivate functions, sites which rely on advertising could see their revenues plummet, not just because ads aren’t displayed any more, but because those that are might no longer be as well-targeted.

Nevertheless, search engines will still be able to include ads with their results based on a user’s search terms, and sites will be able to include scripts within their own domain instead of hosting them externally.


The final version of Internet Explorer 8 is due at the end of the year.  You can download beta 2 here, but Windows XP users should know that if they install SP3, they will not subsequently be able to uninstall Internet Explorer 8 beta to go back to IE 7, the current version.


> Description of InPrivate