Personal Bar & Contacts:
The purpose of a Beta release is for us, the product team, to solicit feedbacks and bug reports from testers such as yourself.  Thus far the IE 6 Technical Beta program has been very effective in this regard, identifying several bugs, and providing lots of feedback on what you like and dislike about the product. In one place in particular, feedback has been fairly clear.  While some users, particularly more technically savvy users, liked the Personal Bar and Contacts features, the majority of users did not.  The feedback we’ve received in the newsgroups and direct communication with beta testers tells us that simplicity, quality, and performance are top goals for the product, and that the Personal Bar and Contacts features were contributing to none of these. Rather than continue to expend resources on a feature that most of our customers would not use, we have made the difficult decision to cut the Personal Bar feature, and refocus our efforts on the basics of browsing, as well as other features such as Privacy, Media Playback, and Image Browsing.

Smart Tags:
This build also introduces support for SmartTags.  This is a feature that allows end users to get contextual information about different items in the content that they are browsing.  This feature is on by default and can be turned off through the Advanced Option dialog.

Virtual Machine:
In Windows XP and the downlevel OS redist of Internet Explorer 6, the Microsoft Virtual Machine will no longer be packaged as part of the installation.  This change is effective in the latest IE6 tech beta build.  Those end users that do not have a previous version of the Virtual Machine installed on their machines, the Virtual Machine will be installed on demand, from the Web, the first time that it is needed.  The effect on end users will be minimal.  Content will continue to work and the support for the technology will remain at the same level as it was in previous releases.  OEMs and corporations will be able to create and deploy custom packages that include the Virtual Machine, using the Internet Explorer Administrators’ Kit (IEAK).  Also, the Microsoft VM will continue to be available for download from Microsoft.com and Windows Update.  This method of distribution gives the company greater ease of delivery and responsiveness in distributing updates to the Virtual Machine to our customers.

Privacy:
This build incorporates the latest changes to the Privacy feature in IE 6.  We are looking to you for feedback on this feature.  Please take a look at the latest build and actively try out this functionality, and let us know what we may be missing, or is presented in a non intuitive manner, in relation to Privacy and cookie management.  Also, please test your sites and deploy compact policies (for more information, please refer to http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/security/privacy/ie6privacyfeature.asp).  Note that support for the test (TST) compact policy will be discontinued in the final release version.

A key difference between the privacy capabilities in IE 6 and previous IE releases is in relation to the P3P based privacy policies associated with each cookie.  While in previous versions users were able to do fairly extensive cookie management, users did not have any sense as to the site’s intent in relation to their cookie usage, and were not able to make an informed decision on whether to accept or reject cookies.  The Privacy feature in IE 6 enables the sites to establish a trust relationship with their users, through their P3P based privacy policies.

This latest beta build exposes a wider range of privacy options, as well as it re-enables functionality that was present in previous IE releases, within the context of P3P policies.  End users are now able to reject/accept cookies from a specific site and they are also able to be prompted for every cookie.  End users can request to view a site’s full P3P XML based policy.  Last, end users are able to import custom Privacy policies (this flexibility is useful for corporate deployment, or for organizations that want to standardized or promote different levels of privacy to end users).