Figure 1
Skip the color coding functionality of tabs by turning off the Tab Grouping feature
After doing web browsing with IE8 browser, you will definitely notice that certain tabs are color-coded, for example, as shown in Figure 2 below. This is the part of the tab grouping feature. If you open a link in a new tab, this new tab will be part of the tab group that appears on your page. However, all these color-coded tabs can sometimes make users feel uncomfortable and messy.
If you don't like this feature, you can turn off tab grouping by opening the Internet Options window, in the Tabs section, click the Settings button . Then uncheck the option Enable Tab Groups (see Figure 3).
Disable the ability to recover previous browser sessions
Another feature Microsoft introduced in IE8 is the ability to restore previous sessions, which you can access by clicking Tools > Reopen last browsing session .
The ability to reopen the entire last browsing session is an interesting feature, but it also causes many privacy issues when sharing computers with others. You can disable this feature in both home and professional versions of Windows.
Here's how to disable the restore feature in XP Professional using Group Policy settings:
The same process in Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate or in Windows 7:
One trick we've found in the Home versions of Windows - or whatever version of Windows XP and Vista - is to prevent IE from saving the final session details:
Stop suggesting sites
Features suggest new sites (Suggested Sites) in IE8 use your browser deposit to push out sites that you might be interested in. These sites are displayed when the Favorites toolbar button is clicked. Although the site suggestion feature in IE has many advantages, if you want to share your computer with another user and don't want to disclose the pages you've visited then this is a problem.
You can easily disable this feature by clicking Tools > Suggested Sites to turn it off or on.
Use InPrivate Browsing private browsing mode
InPrivate Browsing feature allows you to use IE in a special mode, in this mode the browser will not save, by default no add-ons are enabled. This is useful if you want privacy when surfing the web. Maybe you want to go online to find a Christmas gift, plan a holiday or find a new job. Anything, you can enter this mode when you don't want to leave traces of where you went.
To call session browsing InPrivate, click Safety > InPrivate Browsing . Microsoft did not add a separate icon or shortcut on the desktop or Start menu to access this mode. However, you can create it yourself by editing or creating a new shortcut. Then just add -private to the end of the location in the shortcut, as shown in Figure 4 below.
Change the InPrivateBrowsing homepage
If you are an InPrivate Browsing fan, you may be annoyed by the About: InPrivate page, which always appears instead of the home page every time you open a new session. If you are using the direct open method discussed above, you can add the site address you want to display at the end of the location in the shortcut, for example:
"C: Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe" -private google.com
However, this will not change the actual homepage feature. You will still see the About: InPrivate page when opening new sessions via the Safety menu in IE8. Although it is not simple to change, we still have a way to change the default home page settings in the registry:
Figure 5