Use web proxy auto-discovery in Safari

Jul 14, '09 07:30:33AM

Contributed by: Piquan

Unlike most browsers, Safari doesn't have a setting to use WPAD (web proxy auto-discovery) in OS X. However, there is a way to ask Safari to automatically detect the network's proxy settings, but only if your network administrator has configured WPAD on your network.

This auto-detect feature works through DNS. The browser looks for a host named "wpad" and if it exists, loads its settings by accessing a file named "wpad.dat" via HTTP. To use DNS-based WPAD with Safari on OS X, follow these steps:

Again, this is only helpful if your network administrator has set up a proxy to be auto-configured. If you're on a network that doesn't have such a setup, Safari will still work but much, much slower. To find out if your network supports proxy auto-detection, visit http://wpad/wpad.dat in your web browser. If your network supports WPAD, then your browser will download the file "wpad.dat" (which you can just delete). If it's not supported, you'll get an error message.

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