Microsoft announced that it is currently working to incorporate private browsing into Internet Explorer 8, while reports suggest Mozilla could have similar functions in store for Firefox.

Users have already dubbed the new privacy functions to be added to Internet Explorer 8 “porn mode” because of the obvious advantages of being able to surf the web and not have your searches recorded in your browser history or have cookies stored in your system.

The browser history has long been a bone of contention among those who believe users should be in control of how much of their information is being stored. A lot of people don’t like the fact that the next person to use the machine can see exactly where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing on the net and this is particularly a problem with family PCs or shared computers.

Whether it comes down to watching porn or doing your Christmas shopping online, private browsing is definitely going to make IE8 a popular choice among users so it’s no surprise to see that Mozilla is planning a ’me too’ feature for Firefox.

IE8’s InPrivate offers four different settings to allow users to control what information is stored and even the information exchanged with third parties.

InPrivate Browsing lets you control whether or not Internet Explorer saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data related to what you’ve been looking at on the web.

Delete Browsing History (introduced in IE7) helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited websites.

InPrivate Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history and allows you to block it.

InPrivate Subscriptions allows the user to get more out of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to and maintaining lists containing specific websites they want blocked or allowed.

It is easy to see that InPrivate does not simplify the general browsing experience, but makes security decisions more complex and requires from users a deeper understanding what potential security exist on the Internet, which ones have to be taken serious and which ones can be handled in a more casual way. Microsoft appears to be reacting to a scenario in which security gets too complex with InPrivate Subscriptions, to which users can subscribe in the same way they add an Accelerator, Web Slice, or search provider to IE.

In this way, granular decisions about what content to allow and which one to block can be avoided: "Under the covers, InPrivate Subscriptions are simply RSS feeds of Regular Expressions that specify sub-downloads to block or allow. Anyone can publish an InPrivate Subscription on their website, just as they can offer an Accelerator or Web Slice on their website," Microsoft said.

The Beta 2 of IE8 is expected to be released before the end of the month.