What’s The Best Proxy Extension For Chrome?

I remove broken links regularly here on Ghacks. Today I stumbled upon a review of a proxy extension for Google chrome. The extension had been discontinued, and I made the decision to try and find a suitable alternative for that extension. The quest for the best available proxy extension for Google Chrome had started.

I had several requirements: The extension should be dead easy to use, ideally with a click of a button. But web proxy use is not all about ease of use. The proxy should support popular websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Wikipedia. While the latter site should not pose a problem for most web proxies, the former might. Facebook and Twitter make use of https, and not every proxy supports those.

YouTube support on the other hand is something that you find rarely supported by proxies, mainly because of the bandwidth requirements of the streaming videos.

When you search for proxy in the Chrome web store, you end up with 39 items at the time of writing. Not all of those are web proxy extensions on the other hand. If you remove those that are not, you end up with less than a dozen proxy extensions.

Only one has passed all the tests.

HideMyAss Proxifier

This Chrome extension adds a button to the Chrome interface. If you press the button a form pops up. You can then enter a url manually or by pasting it into the form. That website is then opened via the web proxy in a new tab in the browser.

The proxy works with all kinds of websites. You can use it to watch videos on YouTube for instance. Even better, the proxy’s IP is located in the United States, which gives you access to contents that might be blocked in your country.

Not all contents are displayed on websites. While it is for instance possible to watch videos on YouTube, you do not see video thumbnails on the YouTube pages.

The concentration on one proxy has another possible disadvantage. If the proxy is blocked on your school, university, company or a public network, then you cannot benefit from the extension and proxy at all.

The HideMyAss Proxifier is available at the Chrome web story.

Verdict

If you are looking at the state of proxy extensions for Chrome, you will notice that there are few. Even worse, of those few only one works on all sites that I have tested the proxies on.

You still have alternatives, for instance by loading web proxy websites directly in your web browser, for instance from your bookmarks. That’s usually only one additional click compared to an extension.

Are you using proxies in the Chrome web browser? If so, which are you using?

Related Articles:

Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday May 11, 2011 -
Tags:google chrome extensions, proxy, web proxy

Responses so far:

1. MartinDK says:

   May 12, 2011 at 12:08 pm

   Thanks for the tip! This sounds like a nice extension (especially with a humorous name like that :D).

   I’ll try it out immediately – crossing my fingers. The last Chrome proxy extension I tried was broken – it kept sending me to a site advertising for Japanese hospital trips(!), but didn’t let me sneak around any geoblocks.

   But the fact that you even go back and remove broken links just makes me admire this site even more! :)

   Reply
   • Martin Brinkmann says:

     May 12, 2011 at 1:15 pm

     Fixing broken links is important, both for the readers who come to expect a link if there was one, and for the search engines, who probably are not to happy if your site has lots of broken links ;) But fixing those links is really a pain in the you know what.

     Reply
2. BobbyPhoenix says:

   May 12, 2011 at 2:59 pm

   I use Megaproxy (megaproxy.com). Once you get it set up you can go anywhere even if your place of use (school, business, etc) blocks proxies. The downside is Flash is not working, so you are limited, and it’s $10 a month, but I find the trade offs worth it. I’m going to give this one a try to see how it compares. Thanks for the review.

   Reply
3. TRY says:

   May 12, 2011 at 9:22 pm

   Better to invest some money on well-known and trusted VPN’s like
   StrongVPN, HideiPVPN, AceVPN, Xerobank, …

   Reply