Customizing Internet Explorer with User Stylesheets

  • Article

4/19/2010

Internet Explorer Mobile has supported user style sheets ever since the release of Windows Mobile 2003. User style sheets provide a powerful method for customizing the web browsing experience, and are one of the core features of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). For more information on user style sheets and the cascade part of Cascading Style Sheets, see this Web site. For more information on this topic, see this Microsoft Web site.

Example use of User Style Sheets

The following example hides all images in all web pages, by creating a style sheet that sets the display property of all images to "none".

  1. Using Notepad, create a text file that contains this line:
img { display:none !important }
  1. Because this line contains an img object display property that has display set to none , Internet Explorer Mobile does not load images. The !important element forces this style sheet rule to trump any other author rules.
  2. Save the text file with the name noimages.css. You must save the file as Unicode, or else the style sheet will not function.
  3. Set the SYSTEM attribute on the style sheet file on your desktop. This is necessary for security reasons.
  4. Copy noimages.css to the \windows directory on the device.
  5. Using a Registry Editor, locate the key
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Stylesheet
  1. Within that key, create the following registry entries:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Stylesheet\NoImages
Enabled = 1
File = "\windows\noimages.css"
  1. Restart Internet Explorer Mobile, and it no longer displays images on any web pages.