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Internet Explorer 8 and InPrivate Filtering

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I just noticed pretty cool feature which I have previously managed to miss. And that is InPrivate Filtering in IE8. It’s basically mechanism that allows you to filter content from the web pages. Previously I haven’t thought this as “Adblock functionality” but I did a test and noticed huge difference on web page rendering performance after adding some filtering.

So if you like to also remove some noise (a.k.a. ads :-) from web pages just follow these steps:

Open InPrivate Filtering Settings under Safety menu:

InPrivate Filtering menu 
I used “Choose content to block or allow” and then I selected all entries and clicked the Block button (this list was already populated by IE):

InPrivate Filtering settings 
Since I wanted to add more filtering using regular expressions I clicked “Advanced settings” from the previous dialogs. It then shows you this list:

InPrivate Filtering Advanced settings
In this dialog you can “Import” or “Export” rules. I just exported rules to XML file and opened it in Visual Studio:

 1234567891011121314
 
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:wf="https://www.microsoft.com/schemas/webfilter/2008"> <channel>  <title>IE Blocked URLs</title>  <description>Export of InPrivate Filtering</description>  <item>   <description>example/*/examplescript.js</description>   <wf:blockRegex><![CDATA[example/.*examplescript\.js.*]]></wf:blockRegex>  </item>  <!--    Repeat "item" per regular expression    --> </channel></rss>

After that I added few item elements with most commonly used ad servers and saved the file. Then I just imported the XML and started enjoying much faster browsing experience! And I was also glad that I got rid of those flashy things on the web pages...

Now you might thing that this only works in InPrivate mode but that’s not the case. You can turn it on from the menu (see first screenshot) or just toggle it with Control+Shift+F even in normal browsing mode.

Hmm... I might even do some testing to get some performance numbers out from my system.

Anyways... Happy hacking!

J

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2009
    Great info! Now we just need a simple way to export from adblock plus into this list in IE to get parity between the browsers. Honestly there are only two reasons I use Firefox as my primary browser:
  1. Adblock Plus
  2. new tabs open instantly instead of a couple of seconds. I could probably overlook #2 if I had parity with #1 - even with an export / import process.

  • Anonymous
    November 23, 2009
    Sometimes Inprivate Filtering mode goes off. Why?

  • Anonymous
    November 23, 2009
    Hi IL! You can make it start it automatically by using this reg key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSafetyPrivacIE] "StartMode"=dword:00000001 Then it is always started. Anyways... Happy hacking! J

  • Anonymous
    November 24, 2009
    New tabs open instantly if you modify the browser settings to open the new tab with about:blank url.

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2010
    The counter-argument to blocking ads is presented here: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars