Important Proxy Management

The Proxy Per Tab extension worked great for years and had many new ideas regarding how proxy usage may be implemented in the browser. After a decade, it became apparent that in order to add support for new mobile platforms to Insomniac Browser, proxy management should be implemented as an internal browser feature. So a Proxy Bar and Proxy List were implemented as a Proxy Per Tab replacement to eliminate that limitation and bring a new experience with proxy usage. Without Proxy Per Tab, navigation is faster and demands less memory. Proxy Bar is a second button at right from the address bar, it shows what connection a current tab is using (system or direct), and in the case of a proxy, it shows the proxy name. Clicking on the Proxy Bar, one can open a bubble window, where details about the current tab connection are displayed, and various actions can be taken. 

N.B. The method “Proxy per session in order” together with the “Shuffle” button usage is the most strict and preferable one for those who do not want their proxies to be used multiple times. Because the “Random proxy per session” is a simple method that randomly picks one of the proxies you have. While “Proxy per session in order” + “Shuffle” creates a random sequence of proxies and then uses them one by one. This means one proxy won’t be used again unless all of the others were used in the current iteration.

Proxy Bar bubble, it is possible to:

– choose a proxy method, which will be used for each new session (or tab);

– reload the current tab with other proxy settings, disabling the current proxy (if any). That can be done using keyboard shortcuts as well;

– open Proxy List. There are four proxy methods available for usage:

– System settings (a proxy set in OS, if any, is used);

– Direct connection;

– Random proxy per session (proxies may be repeated randomly, more proxies, less probability that proxies will be repeated);

– Proxy per session in order (proxies will be used in the order listed). 

Proxy List is an internal browser page insomniac://settings/proxylist where one can manage a list of proxies. One can drag and drop an entire file with proxies or copy and paste some proxies or an entire file with proxies. Pasted proxies must be in multiline plain text with commas or tabs as column separators—the columns are described below, where it’s written about importing proxies. The “Clear all” button clears all proxies in the list. The “Import” button opens a file chooser dialog to specify a file with proxies to import. 

File with proxies must be in the Text/CSV format and must have these columns, separated with commas or tabs:

Name,Host,Port,Username,Password,Scheme

If names are empty, they will be generated automatically using the current timestamp. The “Export” button allows you to save the proxy list into a file in the described above CSV format. The old proxy file format used with Proxy Per Tab is compatible with Proxy List. The “Add” button makes it possible to add a new proxy manually.

Each string of proxy settings in the Proxy List has three buttons:

– An eye button, which is used to disable/enable a particular proxy manually;

– An open button, which is used to open a tab with a particular proxy;

– A more actions three dots button, which has three commands to be run on a particular proxy: Copy, Edit, and Remove. In order to make clear a session’s usage in Insomniac Browser, the “Help / Version” bar (the first button at right from the address bar) shows now what session the current tab uses. 

It may be a global session or some private session with a number. All internal pages and domains in the Normal Browsing Mode have a global session. The global session, by default, has a system connection. Still, it is possible to reload an entire global session to another proxy setting using the Proxy Bar bubble or keyboard shortcuts described above. 

However, the global session will have the system connection after the next startup. Also, to showcase when a session can have more than one tab (that case is controlled and produced by target sites, which may open multiple bound tabs), Exclamation Indicators are added. Exclamation Indicator is an exclamation mark in the tab’s caption at the left of the favicon, which shows that tab has the same session as the current tab, and so shares data and device identity. After clicking on Exclamation Indicator, a bubble will be shown, where it is possible to get help about cases when multiple tabs can be bound together.

Regarding missed functionality in 4.1.0.0 version of Insomniac Browser, which Proxy Per Tab had, the 4.1.0.1 version now has them as well:

1. Tags or proxy groups now can be achieved through the proxy filter:
   • to create tags while importing or adding proxies manually, fill the proxy filter value and let proxy names be auto-generated (import them without names);
   • to disable/enable some group of proxies, fill the proxy filter value and click the ‘Disable all’ button. All operations respect the proxy filter value, with the exception of ‘Import’ – it imports all proxies anyway. So one can even export a small group of proxies into a separate file according to the proxy filter value.
   • to enable only one group of proxies, while others should be disabled, one needs to disable all proxies using an empty proxies filter and after that enable the desired group using proxies filter. Proxy filter works with all proxy attributes, so it is possible to create group not only by proxy names, but by host, port, username and even a password value.
2. Random proxy in non-repeatable mode is achieved through the “Next proxy in order” method and the “Shuffle” feature of Proxy List. The shuffle creates a random proxy sequence each time it is invoked (it respects proxy filter value to determine which proxies should be shuffled). The “Original sequence” button in Proxy List reverts proxies to the original sequence (it respects the proxy filter also).

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