A user of the DSL Reports forum has converted the Adblock Plus list of blocked advertisement into an XML format that can be imported into Internet Explorer 8. All that needs to be done is to download the xml file from the website and import it into Internet Explorer 8 so that all of the ads and ad providers on that list are blocked automatically in Internet Explorer 8. The file has a size of more than eight Kilobytes and can be imported into Internet Explorer the following way after downloading and unpacking it.

Open Internet Explorer 8. Access Tools > InPrivate Filtering Settings from the toolbar menu.

A click on the Advanced Settings link in the lower half will open a new window that can be used to import filters in xml format.

The xml list can be imported easily by clicking on the Import button and selecting the xml file from the local hard drive. A message should appear notifying the user that the list was successfully imported. The main window should be filled with blocking rules after clicking ok.

The ads will now be automatically blocked in Internet Explorer. The only problems with this approach are that there is no way of automatically updating the list in regular intervals. There is also no option to enable the list globally but disable it on selected websites.

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Some users might prefer do whitelist websites on a per-site basis and that is perfectly reasonable. Others prefer to whitelist all bookmarks at once which is not doable in the options of the add-on. The author of the add-on however has created a script (discovered at Firefox Mastery) that takes the contents of a bookmarks file and creates a whitelist file out of it.

The process itself is pretty simple, users do need to have access to their bookmarks in html format though. Firefox 2 users can simply access the bookmarks.html file in the Firefox profile folder while Firefox 3 users need to export the bookmarks into html format first which can be done in the Bookmarks Manager.

Once the file is available it has to be opened in a text editor. All contents need to be copied and pasted into the script on the Adblock Plus website.

That script will generate a whitelist file for Adblock Plus which can be imported in the preferences of the add-on.

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The filter list grows over time, I know mine does and becomes ineffective this way due to duplicate entries and ineffective usage of space in the filter list. Thankfully though the Adblock website offers a way to optimize this filter list to make it more effective. Before you can start with the optimization you need to export your current filter list.

Press CTRL + SHIFT + A to open Adblock Plus. Click on Filters > Export Filters to save the filter list as a text document. Now load the Adblock Plus optimization website and paste the contents of the saved filtered list into the form.

The default options that are available at the bottom should be sufficient for most users. Just make sure you check Optimize including preexisting RegExes if you already have an optimized version but added new filters to that one. Click on the optimize button which should display some stats and of course the new optimized filter list.

Now copy and paste the new filter list into a text document and import it again into Adblock Plus. Press CTRL + SHIFT + A again and click on Filters > Import Filters. Select the text document that contains the updated filter list and click ok. Make sure you select Overwrite when asked if you want to overwrite or append the filter list.

My filter list, which only contained 12 lines and 364 chars was reduced to 1 line and 251 chars which means a reduction of 91.7 % and 31 %.

Update:

Wladimir Palant from Adblock Plus contacted me and told me that Adblock Plus users should use the following two scripts if they want to optimize their filter list:

http://adblockplus.org/en/deregifier
http://adblockplus.org/en/redundancy_check

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