Caret Browsing is when you use your keyboard to navigate a web page as you would if you were in a text editor or word processing application. This style of moving within a document is nothing new as it’s been around for a very long time, however most don’t know it exists in web browsers. IE and Firefox both have the Caret Browsing feature, accessible by pressing F7 on your keyboard.

The best use of Caret Browsing is to precisely select blocks of text. When you use your mouse to highlight text, often it will occur that the browser selects something you didn’t want to. With Caret Browsing, the browser enables a cursor that you can move with your keyboard and get right to where you want to be, highlight, select, copy and then paste into your preferred text or document editor.

See video for details below.

Although I know this is being echoed all over the internet I couldn’t resist writing about this one. The upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 (now in Beta 2) has a privacy feature that the internet populous instantly dubbed “porn mode”. This feature is called InPrivate and what it does is that at the end of each session the browser will completely wipe browser/search history, cookies, fliled-in form data, cache, passwords.. everything.

For those interested, Firefox can do the same thing:

Above: The Privacy panel in FF3. Uncheck all boxes save or “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox”, and from the “Settings” button:

..check every box here.

But in a tip of the hat to IE8, IE does make it easier than to go thru all this crapola.

I’m sure FF will develop a way as easy to “go private” as IE does soon enough.