This is a guest post by Scott Mulligan. If you want to guest post on this blog, don’t hesitate to contact me.
There are many great proxy related add-ons for Firefox but most of them are fairly similar. I would like to introduce FoxyProxy which is a little bit different from the rest of the competition. The main strength of FoxyProxy is that it allows you to set up pre-defined “rules” so that FoxyProxy can automatically switch between one or more proxy servers depending on which website you’re browsing.
So as a simple example let’s say that you have been kicked out of a forum and want to be able to continue posting by running a proxy and changing your IP address. You can set up FoxyProxy so that your proxy remains inactive until you go to the website that you are banned from. As soon as FoxyProxy recognizes the URL you have predefined, it automatically opens the website using a proxy and will keep it active until you leave the site. This idea of selectively turning on your proxy for certain websites can save you a lot of time if you are manually turning your proxy on and off. Or on the other hand, it can save you a lot of bandwidth if you are the type of person who leaves your proxy on all the time.
As you can see, the idea behind FoxyProxy is fairly simple but it allows you to do some powerful things. However you don’t always have to use FoxyProxy in this way. You can still use it to set up proxies and manually turn them on and off like you would with other proxy add-ons.
Setting up FoxyProxy
- Download FoxyProxy and restart Firefox when you are prompted after installation.
- After you re-open Firefox you will be prompted with the following message, “Would you like to configure FoxyProxy for use with Tor?” Just click No. You can always do this at a later time.
- Open the FoxyProxy options window by going to, Tools > FoxyProxy > More > Options in the browser menu.
- In the FoxyProxy options window you will see a Default proxy which is your direct internet connection. You can add your own custom proxy by clicking on the “Add New Proxy” button.
- Give your proxy a name by filling in the “Proxy Name” field.
- Next, go to the “Proxy Details” tab and select “Manual Proxy Configuration” where you can add a proxy IP address or host name and port number.
- If you would like to set up your proxy so it only runs for specific websites, then go to the “URL Patterns” Tab and continue reading below for help setting up a pattern.
How do you define which websites will run through the proxy?
Those of you who are familiar with wildcards and regular expressions will feel right at home. But even if you’re not familiar with them, you will be just fine if you follow some examples.
Let’s say that you would like to set things up so that your proxy is only activated when you go to YouTube. The home domain for YouTube is:
But what happens when you go to other pages on the YouTube site? The URL’s change.
http://www.youtube.com/browse?c=23
http://www.youtube.com/members
http://www.youtube.com/shows
So how do you set things up so that the proxy remains active for every YouTube URL? This is where wildcard expressions come in and save us. In computer syntax, the * symbol has a special meaning. It is called a wildcard symbol and it’s a placeholder that can stand for a string of characters of any length.
In this example our URL pattern to add to FoxyProxy will be:
http://www.youtube.com/*
Let’s put this to use in our example. Click “Add New Pattern”.
The URL pattern to add is: http://www.youtube.com/*
You can activate the URL pattern you setup by right clicking the fox icon in the bottom right corner of your browser window and selecting “Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and priorities”.
One simple wildcard character (*) at the end of the YouTube URL tells FoxyProxy to keep the proxy activated for any URL beginning with “http://www.youtube.com/”. So now you can browse around the YouTube site and the proxy will know to remain active. Once you browse to a different site that does not start with the URL you have set above, the proxy will be deactivated. The great thing is that you can add lots of predefined URL patterns for each proxy by substituting a different domain name in place of YouTube.
So to sum things up, this add-on not only improves upon Firefox’s basic proxy settings but it also gives you a lot of extra functionality so you have more control over your browsing experience. An add-on like this is a must have for a lot of people as we begin to see proxies becoming more popular and more web content being censored depending on a users geographical location.
Two thumbs up for Eric Jung who is the FoxyProxy creator! You can find more URL pattern examples on his website.
Scott Mulligan shares “internet knowledge” and helps you better understand the greatest invention that is The Internet. He blogs at ScottMulligan.ca.
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[...] FoxyProxy – A Firefox proxy add-on with a twist - This is a guest post from Scott Mulligan where he shows how to use FoxyProxy, a nice Firefox plugin. The article is great! It’s a must read. Thank you, Scott! [...]
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