Lately, I’ve been finding myself needing to change my proxy configuration quite a bit and started to get annoyed with all the steps I had to do.

The reason I needed to change my settings so much is that I needed to SSH Tunnel to my Rackspace Server in the US so I could use services such as Pandora and Hulu, which don’t allow streaming if they detect non-US IP addresses (I’m currently in Argentina). But then there are times when I have to use a direct connection as some networks I connect to block all ports other than those used for web browsing (I could have the SSH service to listen to HTTP/HTTPS to get around this but I’m currently already using those ports for other services). I wanted to be able to switch back and forth easily and not have to go through so many steps (ok, it’s not really that many steps, but I’m just really lazy and the time I waste doing it adds up).

A quick Google search led me to this awesome free Chrome extension called Proxy Switchy!. It allows you to create multiple proxy setting profiles and easily switch to any of them in 2 simple clicks on your Chrome browser. This is very useful for those who work in multiple offices that require proxies to be configured.

Another plus to this extension is that it allows you to create rules using the powerful regular expression syntax. So let’s say you have there’s a specific URL you needed to visit but will only work using a specific proxy configuration, you can then create a rule in Proxy Switchy! to tell it to use the specified proxy profile when the URL pattern is detected.