On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 09:36 +0100, William John Murray wrote: > I would like to know why the default Firefox setting in Fedora is > "Direct connection to the internet". Is there a speed penalty > for "Auto detect proxy settings"? Well, it would be yet another thing Firefox checks for before starting (browser updates, plugin updates, RSS feed updates - the last one can be a killer), so there would be some penalty. You can check how much of a difference it makes by trying the different proxy options, yourself. The auto proxy detection schemes used by different browsers use different techniques. A DHCP server can provide a proxy address, but I don't think any of the browsers pay attention to that. The usual method is to look at its own domain name, and then try to find a webserver at that domain, or a wpad subdomain, and look for a wpad file on them. With some browsers that's a wpad.dat file, others the file it looks for is config.pac or settings.pac. I went through quite a lot of work figuring that out a few years back, finding and reading poorly documented browser features, and tests with logging requests to my webserver using different browsers. -- (This box runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
