General Options
In here you will find options and configuration for general purpose of the extension.
The underneath description for this option is good enough and says it all. I will just quote it here for references:
If a rule matches the url of a tab, as a result proxy will be applied to connection of the tab. Normally there will be other requests in each page and those might not have a matched rule and thus won't have proxy applied to their connection. What
Enable proxy per tab/originoption does is it makes sure that the whole page including all the connections from different domains and origins are using the same proxy that is applied the origin of the tab. Also this option eliminates the need to have a rule for every single domain. Please note that if no proxy is applied to the tab, proxy rules will continue to work and apply proxy to other connections in the page individually.
Synchronizing means that you can share your setting of SmartProxy between pcs, like your home PC and Work PC. It also keeps a backup online when in a case of data lose like uninstalling browser some other incident.
To enable Syncing first you need to login to your browser, the steps to do this is different in each browser, here is the guide for each supported browser by SmartProxy
If disabled the active profile selected from popup menu in the menu bar will no longer be synced. If in a case that you are using different active profile in your different PCs, you can disable this option to keep them different.
If disabled the active selected proxy server will not be synced. That is the Default Proxy Server that can be changed from both Proxy Servers tab and also from popup menu in the menu bar.
Error detection is referring to set of features that are monitoring the requests and detecting the failures, then providing a convenient way of displaying the list of fails and giving you the ability add rules for these failures.
Enabling and disable the error detection features.
Sometimes you don't want to receive error notifications from certain domain for some reason but still want to have the error detection working. In here you can do that by defining rules. By pressing the button a new tab will open and can add/edit/ delete the rules and maintain them.
The tab is called ignore failures and behaves exactly like smart rules with a exception that it applies to failed requests only.
Control wether you want to see the number of failures on icon in menu bar or not.
SmartProxy comes with the ability to switch between dark mode and light mode automatically.
Auto switch between light and dark mode. This follow your browsers theme which that can also follow the theme of your operation system.
From drop down you have two option to select from
- (Default): this is the smart proxy default light theme
- (Custom): Selecting this will show a new box in which you can enter a url to a css file.
Using external css file as an theme:
In the Custom Styles (Css) Url: box you can enter an url for light bootstrap theme. That being a bootstrap theme is a most otherwise you might end up with unexpected results.
As a suggestion you can use themes provided by bootswatch.com. While using external css be aware that they may contain link to font files or another external css files, for example in case of Cosmo theme of bootswatch the css file contains a link to Google fonts, this link.
External fonts or css linked inside the theme provided to the theme in Smartproxy will cause a delay. This delay can be unnoticeable if you don't use proxy or your connection is high speed. The problem will occur if your proxy server is slow for any reason. In this case the popup menu of SmartProxy will be very slow to display on first tries or even next tries, because as you've probably guessed it, tries to load the external css files each time and fails or even because there is no caching in server.
As a verdict on external css files always check the source and look for @import and @font-face and use with caution.
The same as the Light Theme rules and description also applies here as well. The only difference is that when AutoSwitch is selected when the browser theme changes to dark the settings of Dark Theme will be used for SmartProxy.
Here are the rest of settings.
This is checked by default which enables the shortcuts for certain actions in browser for SmartProxy. Just note that Google Chrome is limited to 4 shortcuts and in Firefox we can have 6 shortcuts in total. Just click the View shortcuts link to view the list of shortcuts and the bound key combination.
How to change the shortcuts:
- Google Chrome:
- Navigate to
chrome://extensions/shortcutsurl. - Find SmartProxy section and start editing the shortcuts.
- Navigate to
- Firefox:
- Here is a nice guide about managing extension shortcuts in Firefox
This is enabled by default which will display a nice browser notification in bottom right side of screen whenever you press a shortcut and is handled by SmartProxy.
The proxy rules usually have a source which is helper to identify which site or domain is the rule needs to be applied to. When a rule is applied to the active tab (and the top level url) when this check is enabled the source will be displayed in the tooltip of the SmartProxy icon when hover mouse over it on the rop right corner of your browser. You can see an example of the tooltip in the screenshot below.
This behaves exactly same as above "Display applied rule source on badge" checkbox, except this time the actual rule will be displayed. This rule can be a match pattern or a RegEx expression.
Here is sample of tooltip in action:
