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Privacy Preferences allows you to prevent some of the annoying, privacy-invading behaviors of many web sites.
Most of the preferences in this panel involve "blocking" images and other media so you don't see them in web pages. Any image that has been blocked by these preferences will be displayed as a colored rectangle with a icon, which you can click to cause the image to be loaded.
Don't load anything from sites matching these expressions - If checked, no web pages, images, or other media will be loaded from web sites whose addresses match the patterns listed in the table. To add or remove patterns to the table, click the + or - buttons below it.
The patterns listed in the table are regular expressions. "Regex" is a very sophisticated language used by many programs for matching patterns in text; a full explanation of it is well beyond the scope of this documentation. (Searching the web for "regex" or "regular expressions" should result in plenty of enlightening reading.) However, there are two tips which are immediately useful in this context:
- You'll need to put a backslash "\" before every period in a hostname; otherwise, the period will be interpreted as a special pattern-matching character.
- Inserting the ".*" sequence will match anything. For example, if you put "ads\..*\.com" into the list, OmniWeb will block media from ads.foo.com, or ads.bar.com, or ads.blegga.baz.com, or ads.anything.com.
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Don't automatically load images:
- whose sizes match the standard sizes for ads - The International Advertising Bureau defines several image sizes which are to be used for advertisements. Not all advertisers use these sizes, but many do. If this box is checked, any image that has a link and whose size matches one of the IAB sizes will be blocked.
- that aren't from the site they're shown on - Usually, ads and other images you don't want (such as invisible "web bugs" that can be used to track you from site to site) don't come from the same server as the page they're embedded in. Checking this box will cause those images to be blocked.
Beware, however, that there are many sites that legitimately send you pages and images through different servers (using service providers such as Akamai). OmnWeb will attempt to keep from blocking such images, but its logic isn't perfect.
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