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Portablizing Chrome Extension Switchy

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Glorfyboy
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Portablizing Chrome Extension Switchy

I'd like to make the Chrome Extension Switchy portable. For its automatic switching rules it creates a file then points the IE settings to it under LAN settings. I'd like for the launcher to clean this up when I close chrome portable, is this possible?

Here's the site for the extension: http://switchy.samabox.com/

It's a pretty nice utility and it's what allows me to access portableapps.com at work, and post this actually. I'd appreciate any help or guidance, thanks.

John T. Haller
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Other Options

Switchy isn't a true Chrome proxy, it's an IE proxy switcher (since Chrome doesn't have built-in proxy abilities and uses Windows). As such, portablizing it could be tricky.

If I recall correctly, Chrome does support passing the proxy in as a command line option (it would be AdditionalParameters=--proxy-server= in the GoogleChromePortable.ini). So, you could have that defined for one copy of Chrome or just keep it in there as GoogleChromePortable.bak normally and rename it to GoogleChromePortable.ini when you need to use it.

We may be able to take advantage of this within our launcher once we add additional proxy options at the platform level as well (as opposed to now where it simply auto-detects and uses the proxy defined for the local PC for the updater and app directory).

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Glorfyboy
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Yes

Yes, I'm aware of that road, and am using it with a second launcher I compiled from the script in source so both are readily available and launchable from the menu. Switchy offers me, however, the ability to use the proxy only for certain URLs. This is great since I'm using a socks 5 proxy to my home system, and said ISP has a greatly throttled and slow upload speed. By using switchy it means I'll use the much faster work connection for sites that aren't demolished by their DNS web filter, while still being able to access other sites, portableapps.com for example, through the socks 5 proxy.

Now I could manually clear what switchy leaves behind in the IE Proxy options, I was just wondering if it would be possible to automate that procedure when I close chrome portable.

At least the updater does use the IE proxy settings which means I can still use the updater at work, though its a little annoying to turn it on and off when I want to update, it saves a lot of manual hassle. I'd be very much interested in the ability to define a proxy for the updater at a platform level and am happy to hear it's planned/under consideration.

John T. Haller
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The issue is that it would have to be built into the launcher and it would muck with the local proxy settings, which is a bit dangerous overall. I'm not even sure you can modify them without admin rights.

In that case, I'd suggest using a second browser for those URLs. Unlike Chrome; Opera, Firefox and SeaMonkey are all complete browsers where you can independently define a proxy. You can keep one around to fire up those specific personal URLs in.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Glorfyboy
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That's true too, and an

That's true too, and an excellent idea actually. I guess I got a little carried away with messing with Chrome.

Thanks for the help!

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