Thank you Andrew for the nice explication!
2010/2/19 Andrew Lewman <and...@torproject.org> > On 02/15/2010 12:09 PM, Michael Gomboc wrote: > > Why is polipo used and no longer privoxy? > > The first question is, "why a http proxy at all?" > > The answer is, because Firefox SOCKS layer has hard-coded timeouts, and > other issues, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=280661. > Personally, I don't use an http proxy, I simply let my browser talk to > tor via socks directly. The user experience sucks, because you'll > receive untold numbers of "The connection has timed out" warnings, > because firefox won't wait for Tor to build a circuit. Chrome, Safari, > and Arora (amongst others) don't have this problem. > > Once Firefox fixes bug 280661, we don't need a http proxy at all. > However, given the current pace of progress on 280661, we may switch to > Chrome before the fix occurs. > > The second question is, "why switch from privoxy to polipo?" > > Privoxy is fine filtering software that works well for what is it > intended to do. However, it's user experience is lacking due to it > lacking a few features, namely, http 1.1 pipelining, caching most > requested objects, and it needs to see the entire page to parse it, > before sending it on to the browser. Lack of these three features is > the reason we switched from privoxy to polipo. > > We've received plenty of feedback that browsing with polipo in place of > privoxy "feels faster". The feedback indicates that because polipo > streams the content to the browser for rendering nearly as fast as it > receives it from Tor, the user understands what's going on and will > start to read the web page as it loads. Privoxy, necesarily, will load > the entire page, parse it for items to be filtered, and then send the > page on to the browser. The user experience, especially on a slow > circuit, is that nothing happens, the browser activity icon spins > forever, and suddenly a page appears many, many seconds later. > > If Tor was vastly faster, privoxy's mode of operation wouldn't matter. > We're working on making Tor faster. However, purposely showing the user > how slow tor can be with privoxy was a huge point of complaint, and not > what we intended to do. > > Does polipo have some bugs? Sure. Chrisd primarily, among others, is > working on fixing them. At the current rate of progress on firefox bug > 280661, we'll have polipo fixed before mozilla releases the SOCKS layer > fix. Chrisd even wrote Mozilla a patch and submitted it on the bug. > > The final point is that this is all free software. You are in control. > If you don't like polipo, but do like privoxy, then don't install > polipo and use privoxy. > > The power of choice is yours. > > -- > Andrew Lewman > The Tor Project > pgp 0x31B0974B > > Website: https://torproject.org/ > Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/ > Identi.ca: torproject > *********************************************************************** > To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with > unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/ > -- Michael Gomboc www.viajando.at pgp-id: 0x5D41FDF8