My biggest gripe I’ve ever had with my Mac experience has been with my favorite of applications: Firefox.
My place of employment, Natcoll, uses an internal proxy to ‘measure and protect’ bandwidth usage. Because I take my MacBook to and from work, I have to tell my mac to switch to my Natcoll network location, so that everything that needs to get online knows to use Natcoll’s proxy.
Doing that manually was a hassle, but now with Marco Polo 2.0.1 automatically changing my network locations better than ever, that’s been solved. I tried Marco Polo when it was 1.0 but it didn’t have all the evidence sources that I needed, but it’s all good now 🙂
Even with Marco Polo to reconfigure my network settings for me, it wouldn’t affect Firefox — Firefox doesn’t look at the operating system’s settings, and just uses it’s own damn settings. This is true on all platforms. Camino for OS X watches Network Location, but Camino doesn’t have all the neat plugins that Firefox does.
Turns out my solution for this was… yet another Firefox plugin! Specifically, System Proxy, which gets Firefox to inspect OS X’s Network Location for proxy settings! Hooray! Firefox plugins, is there anything you can’t do?
So with Marco Polo and System Proxy, I can just pop my computer open at home and at the office and have it just connect, without me having to worry about it, which is the way these things are supposed to work, right?
Thanks for this tip! I also take my MacBook to different locations, one of which makes use of a proxy server. Camino was OK because it obeys the network location settings, but I like Firefox better. I had looked a few times for solutions without finding anything. I also had a look at Marco Polo: great stuff! So thanks again.
I’m wondering if the solution you describe could apply to me: I’m living in the Dominican Republic and trying to watch playoff hockey via a number of available live streams none of which seem to work here. For example, cbc.ca, hockeywebcasts.com; yahoosports … in all cases a message comes up indicating that the stream can’t be accessed in my country.
Any advice would be much appreciated,
Al Romano