Adblock Plus Now Available For Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer (IE) is not as friendly to add-ons as Chrome and Firefox are, and in fact the Metro version of IE does not support add-ons at all, but Ad-block plus is finally available, in preview form, for IE with limited functionality.  IE does have its own built in ad-blocking with Tracking Protection Lists, but ad-block plus does provide a little more functionality.

adblock-plus-internet-explorer

From their blog post:

  • You will have to choose a different installation package depending on whether you are running 64 bit Windows or not. The goal is to have a single installer of course that will choose the installation package automatically but we don’t have it working correctly yet.
  • The development builds will update automatically but the update experience is far from being great. The user interface is suboptimal and chances are that the updater will ask you to restart Windows — sorry about that. Our primary goal was to make this work at all (which proved surprisingly difficult) and we will improve later.
  • The AdblockPlusEngine.exe process starts automatically when you start up Internet Explorer with Adblock Plus. However, it won’t shut down when the last Internet Explorer window is closed. Fixing this is on our TODO list.
  • The ABP icon shows up in the status bar of Internet Explorer. However, the status bar is hidden by default in newer Internet Explorer versions so this isn’t a great location. Of course, displaying a hint explaining how to enable the status bar isn’t a solution — we are still looking for a proper solution here.
  • Currently the ABP icon doesn’t do anything beyond showing the Adblock Plus preferences. It should show a menu instead that will at least allow disabling Adblock Plus on a website without going to preferences.
  • There is no first-run page to indicate that Adblock Plus was installed correctly — this is work in progress.
  • The processing of blocking rules and especially the element hiding rules is sometimes different from Firefox and Chrome. We are working on some of the issues, others will unfortunately be unavoidable however.
  • We are still working on the performance of our solution, right now there are some issues like Internet Explorer startup being delayed by Adblock Plus (fortunately this is a one-time thing).
  • Metro mode Internet Explorer in Windows 8 and Internet Explorer in Windows RT are locked down environments that don’t allow any third-party code to run — including Adblock Plus. So we unfortunately cannot support these environments at the moment.
  • Enhanced Protected Mode of Internet Explorer 10 isn’t supported at the moment.

Source: Adblock Plus Blog

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