The chaps over at ITreviewed take a further look at the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 RC1. Here's an excerpt:

IE8 does a better job at protecting your privacy and confidential information when you're online - at least compared to IE7 - and it helps to protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC by detecting imposter (phishing) Web sites. IE8 also supports Data Execution Prevention, a technology that aims to reduce the exploitability of buffer overflows, which are commonly exploited for injecting malicious code. If programmers write their code with DEP in mind, many potential vulnerabilities could be eliminated.

You can now quickly display Web sites that were designed for older browsers, such as IE7. Simply press the new Compatibility View button (located next to the Refresh button on the Address Bar) if you see display problems on a Web site like misaligned text, images, or text boxes. The new SmartScreen Filter lets you browse and e-mail more safely by helping to protect against deceptive and malicious Web sites which can compromise your data, privacy, and identity, and protect your privacy with new InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering features.

InPrivate is a private browsing mode that allows you to launch a new browser session that won't record any information, including searches or Web page visits. During InPrivate browsing sessions, which must initiated by yourself, cookies, searches, Web history, and other information aren't stored where they usually are on your computer. Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome both offer similar technology, as does the current Mozilla Firefox 3.1 Beta 2. Of course, this technology doesn't prevent your ISP or visited Web sites from recording your IP address or other transactional information.