Part 3 Advantages of IE8

Protect your Privacy and Block the Ads and In Private Filtering

Whenever you are surfing the web or opening a site then it is very common that you may encounter many advertisements that are termed as the third party content. This content doesn’t originate from the website that you are visiting but from other sources. Sometimes this content or advertisements may generate virus in your PC and sometimes it is used by these sources to track your behavior. As one encounters such type of content site after site, a thorough profile of the browsing habits of the user, his interests and even the purchases that are made can be assembled by these advertisers with the help of cookies to track the behavior.

Every time an ad is served and whenever the user Double Clicks the Ads then this puts a cookie onto the PC. After that the same site or the other site that puts the subsequent ad checks for that cookie. For example if a user visits around 10 sites and encounters ads on each site from the same source then that source can easily tell the user behavior and can also lists all the sites visited by him and also time spent on each site.

Now, if you want to block such kind of content then IE8 provides you with its new feature also called In Private Filtering. This service selectively blocks the undesirable content such as ads, statistics applications like the Google Analytics, and all the content that does not originates from the visited site. Instead, it just keeps on tracking the sources of the third-party content and then it blocks the source whenever a certain threshold value is crossed. This is generally set to 10 by default. It does not block the content but it blocks the ability of the sources to track your behavior.

This can be turned on easily by selecting In Private Filtering from the Safety menu. This option also allows you to change the default threshold value.

To do this you need to download an XML file that can list all the Web advertisers that are blocked by the Adblock Plus generally a type of add-on for the Firefox. After this, the file is then fed to the In-Private Filtering so that all the advertisers can be blocked form the IE8. To block the content from these advertisers you just need to follow simple steps. Once you open the XML file, change the In-Private Filtering settings by clicking the “Advanced settings” link that is present at the bottom. After that click the Import button given in the Manage Add-ons dialog box and browse to select new XML file.

How to View Incompatible Pages with the help of Compatibility Viewer

Though the IE8 is designed as the most standards-compliant browser but sometimes there may be many pages that may not open in it completely or you may face some kind of difficulty in viewing them. In this case the best option for you is use the Compatibility Viewer.

This can be activated by clicking on the right button of the Address Bar that has a look of a torn sheet of paper.