Enable Ad Blocking in IE8

Ads on websites can be very annoying. They are often distracting, take up a lot of space (especially if you are on a low resolution screen) and are also a major source of malware that could potentially infect your Windows PC.

Firefox has some great plugins that will automatically block ads from being displayed on web sites and therefore protect you from all this pain, however for those Internet Explorer users (no matter how much we try to deny it, it is still the worlds most used browser) it can be quite difficult to get these features.

Well, thankfully, Internet Explorer 8 has the answer with no need to install any third party plugins. A built in service known as the InPrivate Filter can be easily customized to automatically remove ads from websites. The InPrivate Filter is designed to block content that may potentially share your private information out on the internet. This feature can be used to also block website ads.

The Steps:

First download the following filter list (rules.zip) from "www.dslreports.com" (also available from the Downloads section). Open IE8 and go to Internet Options:

 

Select Manage add-ons:

 

Select InPrivate Filtering and import the rules you downloaded earlier:

Finally, enable InPrivate Filtering by pressing "CTRL+SHIFT+F". If this is the first time you have ever enabled InPrivate Filtering it may ask you to answer a setup question, just select "Block". Ads will now be automatically blocked on all web sites (try it out be going to digg.com and notice the ads are now blocked). Please note that InPrivate Filter will need to be enabled each time you open a new browser.

Advance Option:

If you decide the feature is so great that you want it enabled by default then you will need to make a minor registry change. Open regedit (Start > Run/Search > regedit) and go to:

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

Change the DWORD "StartMode" value to 1 (hex)

Now when you start Internet Explorer (even without InPrivate browsing mode) InPrivate Filtering will be automatically started without having to be enabled every time a new browser is opened.