你可能聽過其他人討論過在工作中使用代理繞過web過濾器，或者匿名瀏覽internet，但是你想知道代理是否真的對你有用。今天的帖子將介紹代理可以給你的瀏覽體驗帶來的好處。

今天的問答環節是由SuperUser提供的，SuperUser是Stack Exchange的一個分支，是一個由社群驅動的問答網站分組。

問題

超級使用者讀者Breebran想知道使用代理的好處：

I know students and employees use them to get by web filters. But what else? I hear about “privacy and security”, but I can never find anything really explaining it.

I did see one link that said it stops pages from putting cookies on your computer. But why is that such a big deal when you can just use CCleaner to get rid of them?

What are the benefits of using one?

一個普通人能從代理中受益嗎？對於那些選擇使用代理使其值得的人來說，有足夠的好處嗎？

答案

超級使用者貢獻者gronostaj為我們提供了答案：

Bypassing filters isn’t the reason why proxies were invented. A basic advantage of using them is that they make you more anonymous. This is how you’re connecting to websites when browsing without a proxy:

You’re connecting directly to the server.

• It knows your external IP – that’s a piece of information about you, probably not enough to identify you with certainty, but enough to find out your approximate geographical location.
• It knows the cookies you have on your computer – you may delete them later, but you definitely don’t delete them each time you load a website.
• It knows what browser you’re using and what plugins you have installed. Every time you visit a website, your browser sends the User Agent string which can be used to identify a browser, its version, OS version, and sometimes installed browser extensi***.
• It knows where you’re coming from. An HTTP referrer (sic!) is sent each time you click a link. Basically, when you navigate from one site to another, the target site will know the URL or previous site.

You can try to block cookies, UAs, and referrers in your browser, but there are more programs that use HTTP. Most of them won’t let you tamper with such settings. That’s where we can use a proxy:

Now all your network traffic is passing through the proxy and it can alter it:

• It can replace the User Agent string with some meaningless string or strip out the referrers.
• It can accept all cookies, but not pass them to you, or it can block them altogether.
• It’s the proxy that’s connecting to the server, not you, so your IP isn’t disclosed.
• A proxy can be set up to work system-wide, so programs won’t be able to bypass it.

There are also some extra features that a proxy can provide:

• It can compress your traffic to save some bandwidth.
• It can cache files to give a little boost to page load times.
• It can strip ads from websites before they reach your computer.
• It can block malicious websites.

And finally, it can be used not only against filters, but also as a filter!

如上面的解釋所示，在瀏覽網際網路時，使用代理肯定可以在許多方面讓使用者受益。

有什麼要補充的解釋嗎？在評論中發出聲音。想從其他精通技術的Stack Exchange使用者那裡瞭解更多答案嗎？在這裡檢視完整的討論主題。