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:

 
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):

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


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

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:wf="http://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>

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