What are the benefits of using a proxy? [closed]

Solution 1:

I see a lot of answers about avoiding stuff and privacy. This is true today.

But the reason we used proxies in the past was speed. If you have a few hundred people in an office, all of whom sometimes check a news website (e.g. the BBC homepage for our friends across the channel) then that page would be downloaded for every one of them.

That is needlessly wasteful. You could download it once, store it somewhere (on the proxy), and then when the next person requests it, you check if it has changed. If it has not changed, you forward the local copy to that person.

(The HTTP protocol allows things like checking if a file has changed since date/time, without requesting the whole page).

Solution 2:

Bypassing filters isn't the reason why proxies were invented. Basic advantage of using them is that they make you more anonymous. This is how you're connecting to websites when browsing without a proxy:

 _________                             ________ 
|         |                           |        |
| Your PC |  -----------------------  | Server |
|_________|                           |________|
 

You're connecting directly to the server.

• It knows your external IP - that's a piece of information about you, probably not enough to identify you with certainity, but enough to find out your approximate geographical location.
• It knows the cookies you have on your computer - you may delete them later, but you definitely don't delete them each time you load a website.
• It knows what browser you're using and what plugins you have installed. Everytime you visit a website, your browser sends the User Agent string which can be used to identify a browser, its version, OS version and sometimes installed browser extensions.
• It knows where you're coming from. HTTP referer (sic!) is sent each time you click a link. Basically, when you navigate from one site to another, target site will know the URL or previous site.

You can try to block cookies, UAs and referers in your browser, but there are more programs that use HTTP. Most of them won't let you tamper with such settings. That's where we can use a proxy:

 _________           _______           ________ 
|         |         |       |         |        |
| Your PC |  -----  | Proxy |  -----  | Server |
|_________|         |_______|         |________|
 

Now all your network traffic is passing through the proxy and it can alter it:

• It can replace User Agent with some meaningless string or stripping referers.
• It can accept all cookies, but not pass them to you, or it can block them altogether.
• It's the proxy that's connecting to the server, not you, so your IP isn't disclosed.
• Proxy can be set up to work system-wide, so programs won't be able to bypass it.

There are also some extra features that proxy can provide:

• It can compress your traffic to save some bandwidth.
• It can cache files to give a little boost to page load times.
• It can strip ads from websites before they reach your computer.
• It can block malicious websites.

And, finally, it can be used not only against filters, but also as a filter!

Solution 3:

As a developer, I sometimes use proxies to see what our website looks like from outside our network.

We recently performed an internal launch followed by an external launch. As part of the testing for the external launch, I used a proxy to confirm that we were indeed displaying the new site to the public. Proxies can also be useful for testing geolocation services - for example, you might want to see the website as a user from the UK would see it.