Church Of The Geek

Update June 16 2008:

The developer of QuickProxy was nice enough to leave a comment on this post informing me that the firefox add-on is alive again! I just installed it in my copy of Firefox 3 RC 3 (Mac) and can’t wait to start using it, as it is definitely the best proxy switch add-on I’ve used.

Awesome!

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Update April 13 2008:

I’ve been running the Firefox 3 beta for a while, and unfortunately it appears quickproxy is no longer being updated. Check out ProxySwitch, which does the same thing.

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A couple months ago I posted about using a SOCKS proxy to secure your traffic when using an open wireless network (or any time you need to redirect traffic in a VPN-like fashion). Ever since then I’ve been using this tip a lot, but it has led to an annoying amount of opening and closing Firefox’s network preferences to check the proxy status.

QuickProxy to the rescue! I just found this today and it is perfect for what I need. It adds a simple icon to Firefox’s status bar which is green when the proxy is in use. Click on it and it turns gray, disabling the proxy.