Firefox’s inbuilt proxy management tools are particularly limited, which then brings us straight to the outstanding FoxyProxy project, a brilliant Firefox extension that acts as a proxy management suite for the Mozilla-based browser. FoxyProxy has a number of features at its disposal, the most prominent of which is its ability to automatically switch between different proxy servers based on URL patterns specified by the user.
FoxyProxy features full activity logging, a particularly easy to use interface, especially when it comes to adding new proxies and switching between proxy servers by hand, and integrates particularly nicely into Firefox itself.
For South African users, it also lends itself to be particularly useful if you find yourself on a Telkom-driven ADSL connection as more often than not you will find yourself experiencing loading problems with SAIX’s transparent proxy cluster. In order to circumvent Telkom’s default routing system, set up the well known dsl-cache.saix.net (on port 8080) as a new proxy in FoxyProxy and enable on those sites giving the most hassles: for example, at the time of writing, Google Analytics and Google Webmasters seem to be struggling quite a bit on the default Telkom configuration!