The ability for web browsers to automatically detect proxy settings is really useful when you have to switch between multiple networks all the time. With Internet Explorer, proxy settings are being detected in both XP and Vista, but things aren’t going so well with Firefox! If you are using Vista and Firefox happens to be your default browser, you have to manually configure the proxy settings for it to work on our student network…which is NOT convenient at all! You can use some proxy switching extensions (E.g. FoxyProxy) to save you a few clicks, but still…that’s something you have to do manually! So…are you sick of doing this all the time and wanted to get the proxy auto detection to work under Vista? Well…you’ve come to the right place! I’ve found that by changing one of the “hidden” preferences in Firefox, you could get the proxy detection to work on Vista! Below is a step-by-step guide on how you could make this happen on your Firefox!
Step 0: Check whether you have proxy auto detection enabled on your Firefox. Open up Firefox, go to Tools -> Options:
And you will see:
Step 1: Click on Advanced -> Network -> Setttings…
And you will see:
Step 2: By default, the No Proxy option should be selected. Since we want Firefox to automatically detect the proxy settings, we select the second option: “Auto-detect proxy settings for this network“, then click on the OK button at the bottom of the window:
Click on the OK button again to close the Options window:
Step 3: Now in the address bar, type in “about:config” and you will see:
Step 4: In the Filter section, type in “dns“, and you will see:
The “network.dns.disableIPv6” is set to false by default! This preference affects Firefox’s ability to detect proxy settings in Vista…so we need to change it from false (default value) to true in order for Firefox to detect the proxy settings. To change the value, just double click on the “network.dns.disableIPv6“, and the value will be changed to “true“. If you look closely, you can see that the Status will also be changed to user set as well, this is because we have changed the default value to something else. With this in mind, you can feel safe to play around with the preferences in Firefox, and if think you’ve done something wrong, you can always reset the value to the default one. (just right click on the preference and click on Reset):
Step 5: Make sure the value for “network.dns.disableIPv6” is set to true and you are connected to the student network (you can test the network using Internet Explorer), now try to use Firefox to surf the web…the proxy settings should be detected automatically without even need to restart Firefox! Isn’t that great ☺
this tip is great ! thanks
Great tip – thank you!
(this also makes Firefox work again under Vista with an automatic proxy configuration url)
i tried and still didn’t work; any suggestions?
im getting a pop up asking for a user name and password:/
How did you ever figure this out?
Cheers for this tip, was annoying having to use IE or manually enter the proxy settings. They just need better wifi around campus now.
thats good..tQ
Thankyou!!!