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I want to change firefox proxy settings on the fly (no, I will not be installing a 3rd party extension for this). I want to open up an instance of firefox without changing my default proxy settings. The use case is that I get access to scientific journals through my school. Right now, if I want to get a journal, I ssh in and setup a SOCKS proxy with

ssh -D 1080 [email protected]

as in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/38755/how-to-download-a-file-through-an-ssh-server. Then I open up firefox and choose manual SOCKS proxy at 127.0.0.1 on port 1080. This works perfectly except that it's a headache to do this every time I want to browse on my school's network. Furthermore, this changes my default settings so all instances of firefox then run through the SOCKS proxy, and when I'm done I need to return all the settings back.

Is there a command line option or small script to open a single instance of firefox with the desired proxy settings? Short of that what would my next best option be?

FYI I'm running debian jessie.

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The easiest way to do this is that you create an additional Profile for using Firefox with the socks proxy.

To create an additional Firefox profile.

  • Close all Instances of Firefox
  • Start firefox with the -p flag
  • This will show up the Userprofile dialog
  • Here you see your default Firefox profile named default.
  • Click on Create new Profile and give it a name ie. school.
  • Now you can start the default profile of Firefox with: firefox -p default i.e. as a Link
  • And your new school Profile with: firefox -p school --> also as a Link
  • Now you can start the school profile and change all the settings you want.
  • If you want back to the default profile close firefox and run the link with the default profile.

Hope this helps.

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