Explorer includes some great security features. For this tweak I will talk about enabling the feature to not save encrypted files to disk. This is a valuable feature. When you connect to a site that is encrypted the data sent over the network is encrypted. Your browser has the key to decrypt and display the information. Why give someone a chance to crack the encryption. If you don't allow IE to save it to disk then it is nearly impossible for someone else to be able to get that file and use brute force to crack it.
- Launch Internet Explorer.
- Select the Tools from the menu bar.
- Then select Internet Options... from the drop down menu.
- Once the internet options has loaded click on the advanced tab.
- Under security find where it says Do not save encrypted pages to disk and check it.
- Click OK
Originally submitted by: Webmaster
The downside? Slow performance, since nothing is saved to the cache even that 1 byte gif image used a dozen times on the page must be fetched from the webserver each time. To make matters worse some user actions may fail such as downloaded files will be deleted and an error presented or opening PDF documents will fail to name a few scenarios.
What are the alternatives?
Use 'Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed'. Each time the browser closes all files will be purged from the cache assuming there is not a lock on a file from another instance of the browser or some external application.
A lot [repeat] a lot of consideration needs to be given before utilizing 'Do not save encrypted pages to disk'. Sounds like a great security feature and it is but the results of using this feature may cause your help desk calls to go up for download failures or slow performance.