There is a new feature in Internet Exporer 7 called ?Delete Browsing History? that gives users an easy way to control the data stored by the browser.
The feature allows users to delete temporaty internet files, cookies, history of visited webpages, form data and passwords with a single mouse click. Currently, IE 6 does support such deletion features but user had to spend a lot of time navigateing across different places and windows tabs on the computer to get rid of all the relevant information and possibly still miss some critical information.
The feature could be useful in cases where a PC is used by different persons so each user would like to save cover the tracks of its web browsing.
What does this feature really do?
It deletes the following items which are split into five categories, listed below:
- Temporary Internet Files: Downloaded files cached on the client for quick access , cached files containing Offline favorites, information stored by other applications in the Temporary Internet Files folder (e.g. attachment files stored by Outlook)
- Cookies: Information persisted by the client on behalf of the server, XML Userdata cache
- History: website addresses (URLs) stored to enable History/most recently used website addresses, typed website addresses used for Addressbar Autocomplete, the list of most recently used website addresses in the Run? dialog, URL History entries (excluding ones marked as Offline Favorites), stored value for Encoding (Code Page), user-entered personal data stored by the client and AutoComplete form data
- Passwords: User-entered personal data stored by the client and AutoComplete password data
However, some IE users would agree that would be useful to be able to permanently exclude some cookies from the erasure list (my.yahoo, amazon, blogger, etc.) or some cookies do serve a valuable purpose, after all.
Web developers would also like a simple "clear cache" button, which would allow them to reload a website including any changed CSS or JavaScript files. Although the feature is currently supported by IE 6, it requires a massive six-click before the reload.