How To Manually Hide Your IP Using Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has been officially released by Microsoft. From now on, no major changes will be done to the final version. Let’s see if important changes were made in the way Internet Explorer can be configured to use a proxy. This a common method to hide your IP address: set up your browser to direct your traffic through a open or private proxy.

The good news is that there are no changes to this part from the previous version of Internet Explorer. So, if you know how to configure your LAN Settings for IE 7.x you won’t have any problems in doing the same for IE 8.

First, you need a proxy. You can find a lot of open proxies on sites like (Samair.ru or PublicProxyServers.com) or you can purchase access to a private proxy. Open proxies are usually slow and have a short life, so, if you can afford it, I recommend you subscribe to private proxy or set up one of your own.

Let’s consider a high anonymous proxy located in China from PublicProxyServers.com: 218.63.106.217:3128. Then you have to perform the following steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer 8
2. Go to menu Tools -> Internet Options (if you don’t see the menu, right-click and check Menu Bar)
   
3. Choose Connections tab and press LAN Settings button
4. In the Local Area Network (LAN) Settings window, check Use a proxy server for your LAN:

   

5. In the same window fill in the Address and the Port taken from the above proxy list (e.g. 218.63.106.217: 3128 where the IP address of the proxy is 218.63.106.217 and the port is 3128):
   
6. Press Ok and then Ok again and you are done.

After the configuration is completed go to www.whatismyipaddress.com and check your new IP address. You can now browse anonymously using Chinese IP address. After you are done, do not forget to uncheck Use a proxy server for your LAN.

That’s it! If you don’t have IE 8 RC1 installed and you want to try it, you can use the download links listed below.

Direct Download Links of IE8 RC1 (via MyDigitalLife)

• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows XP: IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe
• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2 64-bit Edition or Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition: IE8-WindowsServer2003-x64-ENU.exe
• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008: IE8-WindowsVista-x86-ENU.exe
• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Vista 64-bit Edition and Windows Server 2008 64-bit Edition: IE8-WindowsVista-x64-ENU.exe
• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2: IE8-WindowsServer2003-x86-ENU.exe