Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
Dear software developers, or Microsoft, whichever of you is responsible for this irrational behaviour: please stop grabbing the proxy settings from Internet Explorer and silently applying them to other applications. Thus far I've had unexplained errors with MSN Messenger (which has its own proxy settings) and just now with F-Prot anti-virus, which refused to update. All this boils down to me having a proxy set in Internet Explorer (which was required for testing on a customer site, weeks ago.)
Any applications which have their own proxy settings should use them - and only those settings. If you must insist on grabbing settings from a completely separate application (as debated through at least one large court system), at least provide some clue to the user that your application is also grabbing proxy settings set in Internet Explorer, so that they don't have to spend a day trying to figure out why certain applications won't connect to the internet, despite having a tested, good connection.
Here's a good clue (for F-Prot Updater at least): if you have a checkbox that says, "Use proxy for HTTP connections" - and the user leaves it unchecked, it does not mean to use some arbitrary settings for another application. It probably means to not use a proxy, at all.
posted at: 11:00 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
