Tag Archives: Block Ads

Block Ads with InPrivate Filtering and Third-Party Filters

A helpful new feature found in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is the ability to block ads that appear on web pages–especially the ones that seem to ‘follow’ you from site to site by tracking your browsing with cookies.

Image via Wikipedia

First, turn on InPrivate Filtering by using Safety | InPrivate Filtering Settings and select Automatically Block. Click OK.

Next, add a Registry setting that turns on InPrivate Filtering by default so that you don’t have to turn it on every time you start up IE8. In Notepad, create a text file with these three lines:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Safety\PrivacIE]

"StartMode"=dword:00000001

Save this file to your desktop with a name like “FilterOn.reg”; right-click on it; choose Merge.

Next, search the Web for files named Adblock for IE8.zip or EasyListIE8.zip, or search for “ie8 adblock xml list” or similar strings. You are looking for links to downloadable XML files converted from recent filtering lists created for Firefox‘s AdBlock Plus. Download one or more of these XML files to your desktop—you can use more than one without problems—and look at the files in Notepad to make sure that they’re standard text files and not a dangerous executable program (scan them with your antivirus app first, just in case). In IE8, go to Tools | Manage Add-Ons, and click on InPrivate Filtering. Click the Import button, navigate to your downloaded XML file and click Open. IE8 will take a few seconds to process the list. Click Close. Now visit any normally ad-heavy site and enjoy the view of the site with few or no ads.

Internet Explorer 8: Nine Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do