Updated: September 12, 2026

Overview

Thank you for choosing to be part of our community at Blackfish Software, LLC ("Company", "we", "us", or "our"). We are committed to protecting your personal information and your right to privacy. If you have any questions or concerns about our policy, or our practices with regard to your personal information, please contact us at privacy@blackfishsoftware.com.

When you use the IE Tab extension ("our application", or "application"), you trust us with your personal information. We take your privacy very seriously. In this privacy notice, we describe in plain terms what information we collect, how we use it, and what rights you have in relation to it.

This page covers the IE Tab browser extension specifically. For our general privacy practices — including account sign-in, how we use and share information, retention, security, your privacy rights, and how to contact us — see the main IE Tab Privacy Policy. For how the ietab.net web site itself uses cookies, advertising, and analytics, see our Website Privacy Policy.

What We Don't Do

• We do not include any analytics or tracking SDKs of any kind in the IE Tab extension.
• We do not use eval(), new Function(), or any other form of remote code execution anywhere in the extension.
• We do not show ads in the extension.
• We do not sell your personal information to third parties.
• We do not collect anonymous usage statistics or telemetry beyond the license validation check described below.

Cookies

IE Tab offers an optional cookie-sharing feature: when enabled, and a page loads in IE Tab, the extension shares that site's existing cookies between your regular browser and the embedded IE rendering engine, so you're recognized as already logged in on both sides rather than being asked to sign in twice. This is a pass-through of cookies the site already set — IE Tab does not extend, override, or otherwise change how long a cookie lasts or how a session expires.

Separately, when you use the optional cloud-hosted IE feature (see below), IE Tab sets one additional sign-in cookie of its own, named jwt and scoped to hub.ietab.net, so the extension can authenticate you to your remote session. This cookie is only set when the cloud-hosted IE feature is active.

IE Tab for Windows

IE Tab for Windows is primarily a client-only product that uses the local Internet Explorer rendering engine included with Windows. IE Tab for Windows does not transmit your browsing activity, page content, or URLs off your machine.

Licensed (enterprise) installations do send a once-daily license validation check to lping.ietab.net, containing your license key, an extension install identifier, and the installed version number. This contains no browsing data. Free/consumer installations without a license key never trigger this check.

Cloud-Hosted IE (Mac, ChromeOS, Linux)

IE Tab for Windows uses components built into Windows itself, which aren't available on Mac, ChromeOS, or Linux. On those platforms — and optionally on Windows — IE Tab instead connects to a remotely hosted virtual machine running Windows to provide the IE rendering engine.

While a cloud-hosted IE session is connected, keyboard input, mouse/touch input, and clipboard content (only when you copy or paste) directed at that specific IE Tab browser tab are transmitted to the remote session over an encrypted connection (the wss protocol, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks), solely to operate your remote browsing session in that tab. None of this is captured anywhere else on your machine or browser. Screen updates are transmitted back to display the session in that same tab.

This data is not retained after your session ends and is not used for any purpose other than operating that session. Each session runs in an isolated environment on our remote infrastructure, and session-specific browsing data and cache are removed once your session ends.

Because cloud-hosted usage is session-limited, we track the start and end of each session.

Purchase and Account Information

If you purchase a license for IE Tab, we collect and store the name and email address associated with the purchase and license. If you sign in to use the cloud-hosted IE feature, we collect the email address of the account you signed in with.

Extension Permissions

IE Tab is a mature product with functionality to meet the needs of consumers and enterprises across several platforms, and it uses a number of browser extension permissions as a result. Below is what each permission is used for:

• "Storage / managed_schema". IE Tab provides a managed schema so Google Admin administrators can deploy IE Tab settings.
• "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit". Needed for several reasons: (1) to intercept certain navigations, downloads, and links so they can be displayed within IE Tab; (2) on Mac/ChromeOS, to provide a proxy implementation that requires cross-origin access; (3) to provide an API for allow-listed websites; (4) to read cookies so sessions can be shared between your regular browser and IE Tab.
• "Communicate with cooperating websites". Used to communicate with ietab.net for license registration, administrative tools, and the options page.
• "Communicate with cooperating native applications". Used to communicate with the native Windows helper application that renders pages using the IE rendering engine.
• "declarativeNetRequestWithHostAccess". Used to (1) automatically redirect pages matching the URL patterns you've configured in Settings to open in IE Tab, and apply any exclusions you've configured to override that; and (2) temporarily set the correct browser identification header on proxied requests during a cloud-hosted IE session, for the specific tab and request only.
• "downloads" (optional). Only requested if you explicitly enable it. Used as a fallback for URL patterns you've configured to auto-open in IE Tab that Chrome would otherwise treat as a file download rather than a navigation (primarily file:// URLs in enterprise/managed deployments). When such a download starts, IE Tab cancels it and opens the URL in IE Tab instead, then removes the resulting download-history entry it just created.

For how we use, share, and retain this information, your privacy rights, and how to contact us, see the main IE Tab Privacy Policy.