Proxies

Use the Proxy Preferences to set your &browser.name.prefix;TM &browser.name.suffix; proxy servers, as described below. Choose Edit->General Preferences, then select Proxies from the options on the left side of the General Preferences dialog box.

When you access a web page, &browser.name; tries by default to connect directly to the machine specified in the address (or URL). If you're running &browser.name; on a company network, you may find that you can't access web pages outside your network. This is probably because your company has set up a secure network firewall that can't be penetrated except by going through a proxy server. Proxy servers are programs that handle communication between a protected network and the Internet at large. These programs typically verify users and keep a log of accesses.

If you can't access web pages outside your network, you probably need to specify proxy servers. You may need to ask your system administrator for the name of the proxy server you should use, and the corresponding port. The port is the "channel" the proxy uses to listen for particular types of communications requests.

Another reason to use proxies is to improve performance and reduce network traffic. Many proxy servers cache the pages you visit. Caching pages temporarily stores them to disk so they don't have to be downloaded across the network again when they are subsequently accessed. If you have many requests on one network for the same web pages, caching the pages in a single place saves time.

You may need to set a different proxy and port for each of the different protocol types (HTTP, Security, FTP, and Gopher), or you may have to use the same proxy and port for each type. The Security proxy setting is used to access sites that start with the HTTPS protocol. Your system administrator should tell you what you need.

 
You can bypass your proxies when connecting to designated hosts, such as hosts within your firewall. Type the names of the hosts you want to connect to directly, without using proxies, in the Bypass Proxies text field. Use the full host name, in the form server-name.domain-name (for example, myserver.mycompany.com). Separate multiple entries by spaces or carriage returns.

You can also designate entire domains in the Bypass Proxies field by entering a domain name that starts with a period. For example, type .mycompany.com to bypass the proxies for all hosts in the mycompany.com domain.

If you haven't designated any proxies, you don't have to fill in the Bypass Proxies field. In this case, no proxies will be used at any time.

 
SOCKS is another kind of server that allows access across a network firewall. Ask your system administrator if you should be using SOCKS or the protocol proxy servers, or both, and the name of the appropriate servers. Do not fill in values for the SOCKS server and port if you are not using a SOCKS server. If you put values in the SOCKS fields without a valid SOCKS server, &browser.name; will not be able to connect outside your firewall.

 
&browser.name; supports NCSA 1.3.A and CERN 3.0 proxy servers, and later versions.


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