Add “InPrivate” to Internet Explorer 8 when default browser.

Caution: Messing with your registry could potentially mess up your Windows installation. You have been warned, I have tried this on my own computer, and it works for me. Milage may vary.

One problem I had with Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8 is the InPrivate browsing, which lead to two things I didn’t like, the InPrivate mode and InPrivate Filter.

Problem I have with the InPrivate Filter is just stupidity. If you didn’t know, the InPrivate Filter is a used for filtering advertisments on webpages and preventing transmission of information to 3rd parties like advertising companies and such. Sounds great, but the fact you have to manually turn that on, is just redundant, and also it still has to learn what is what by leaving it off, so why bother even turning it on anymore. A quick solution is edit your local host file and update it with a “white list,” but I’ll save that for another day.

Back to the topic, is the InPrivate mode that Microsoft introduced in this new iteration of Internet Explorer 8. What it does in a jist is open a new window in that mode, which will not save any information. So any sites, forms, etc that you visit will not be saved in the history on that computer. This doesn’t mean no one can see what you’re downloading through the ISP, just on the local computer itself, it will not save any history of those events. But how many ways can we activate this really nice feature?

There are a couple ways to do this. By searching you can find that you can have a shortcut do it by adding the command line command “-private” to the end of the target field, or some tweaks that will add it to the context menu of Internet Explorer, or make a favorite I believe that starts up Internet Explorer 8 in that mode. Most of those require opening Internet Explorer 8 first then doing some action to iniate the action of InPrivate, thus opening another process, which I don’t really like doing. I used to open IE8, then hit the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+P to open it up, but I wanted something that would get me there right away.

So I searched high and low, and even asked on IE newsgroup, and didn’t really get anywhere. Last night I was just going to see what the registry had for me in regards to this situation. Low and behold, I found some interesting tidbits, a solution sort to say to my dilema. I found a registry key that would edit the default Internet Program in the start menu, the one that is pinned on the top of your start menu. Basically, now all I have to do is right click on it, and select the dialogue for Inprivate browsing, and there I have the browser in InPrivate mode in a few clicks, rather than even having to open anything up.

So how to do it? Here’s the manual way.

1. Open up Registry Editor (if you don’t know how to do this, probably shouldn’t be messing with the registry).
2. Navigate your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\shell
3. Once there you’ll notice some corresponding keys to the default context menu, add a new key (right click the folder, and add a new key), call it “InPrivate” (you can call it anything I think.).
4. Add a new key to the key you just added and call this one “command”.
5. Change the value of command to (for amd64) “C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe\” -private” -or- (x86) “C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe\” -private”.
6. Optionally, change the default value of the InPrviate key to what you want it to say in the menu, eg “Browser InPrivate”

For a quicker way, just copy and paste the following keys in a text file, and make the extension “.reg” and just run it to add. (Edit as needed for your system).

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\shell\InPrivate]
@=”Browse InPrivate”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\shell\InPrivate\command]
@=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe\” -private”

One thing to note, is that I believe this only works when Internet Explorer 8 is the default Internet Program, as it is adding it to the default Internet program registry key, and not to Internet Explorer 8. You can see this when you right click on the default Internet shortcut, but when pinning IE8, you won’t see the command there.