Idiots at Work

FoxyProxy

FoxyProxy is a good example for Idiots at work. If you start FoxyProxy and ask yourself, how you can configure "HTTPS" differently to "HTTP" you can read this statement:

foxyproxy.mozdev.org/settings-gui.html
As of version 2.5, FoxyProxy has a revamped Proxy Settings GUI built for the 21st century screenshot. The primary change to the screen is the elimination of proxy selection by protocol--HTTP, SSL, FTP, GOPHER, SOCKS. Since FoxyProxy already enables easy routing of traffic based on wildcard and regular expression patterns, it's a simple matter to route traffic by protocol/URI scheme using these patterns.

However this claim simply is false

There is an Option called "Always use this proxy". If you activate this option, FoxyProxy always uses this single proxy setting. There are no such things as "traffic based on wildcard and regular expression patterns".

If you can switch off regular expression patterns, how do the authors get the idea, that the old feature is obsolete? It simply cannot be expressed if you activate this option.

However they are right if they say, this brings FoxyProxy into the 21th century. It looks that in future people will look back into this century and will declare, that this century was doomed to re-invent everything, which was good and usable, in a way, that is became bad and unusable. This was, because everybody thought, that everything needs to be expressed in terms of a new technology ignoring all the old ways which previously were sufficient for all people's need.

The error was, to leave away implementations, which simply were declared "obsolete", breaking old things.

Please rethink my words. Even in Internet new RFCs come out daily, which break old ways which were completely valid in terms of old RFCs. This is new! Previously new RFCs only declared new methods as "SHOULD", not mandatory, if they were in conflict of old RFCs. However newer RFCs start to declare that old implementations which previously were valid as invalid. This starts with BCPs which recommend implementations which even are in contradiction with old "MUST" implementations (for example ANTI-SPAM features, which recommend to reject "MAIL From: <>", which simply is not RFC compliant).

This is the curse of the 21st century. Forget your roots, re-implement everything from scratch with a new and modern layout. Break old ways and make it hard for your users to stay on a standard, which is older than 2 months.

Welcome FoxyProxy team, in the abundant crowd of idiots implementing the 21st century!

Why do I think this is a problem

I do not think this is a problem, I know it is a problem.

I am a roaming user. I have around 25 roaming profiles, where each must have another proxy setting. Some are very similar, however all have their differences. The most easy way to express this is to have 25 different proxy settings and set this proxy to "use this always". However this only worked for me until today.

Today I have the problem, that I now have 2 distinct roaming profiles, where I must route HTTPS and HTTP traffic differently. I cannot express this anymore with FoxyProxy, so I must find another solution now.

Can I do better?

No, not within FireFox.

My solution is to get rid of FoxyProxy entirely and replace it by a proxy written in Python, which then has the advantage, that it will automatically adopt to the right environment afterwards. It also has the improvement, that it is able to re-write requests, will have anonymization features and is able to do a multilayered protocol routing (for onion and i2p URLs).

It is not yet in a productive status, where you can mange this Proxy.

-Tino, 2008-03-24