Can I disable a firefox addon at the command-line?

January 26, 2009 8:10 PM

I have an Thinkpad X61 that I use both at work and home. Internet at work requires a proxy while at home I have WiFi. Switching browser settings is no problem thanks to the awesome Connection Manager software that ships with the Thinkpad. But now things have become a bit complicated. I had to install FoxyProxy because some sites needed a different connection which the regular proxy couldn't handle. Now when I connect to the internet at home, I have to remember to disable foxyproxy otherwise the Internet doesn't work. Is there a way to disable the foxyproxy extension via the command line so that I can automate this process? Google isn't helping. FWIW, I have AutoIt and Autohotkey installed although I'm not really a programmer.
posted by your mildly obsessive average geek to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You may want

Quickproxy firefox extension

Statusbar button to turn the proxy on and off with a single click.
posted by tiamat at 9:47 PM on January 26

tiamat - Quickproxy switches between a proxy setting and direct connection (atleast that's what I understood). I have my Thinkpad Connection Manager setup to do that.

The issue is that Foxyproxy overrides that setting with it's own internal rules and those rules don't work when I leave the office network. Hence my question about trying to disable foxyproxy from the command line via some sort of script.
posted by your mildly obsessive average geek at 12:01 AM on January 27

Well then, I think the answer is no. Firefox only takes certain faily basic command line shell parameters in the first place; I've never heard of any extension that would be able to interact with the external shell that way. Therfore I don't think there's any way you can turn off foxyproxy except from within firefox.

That said, you could always email the developer and see if they could add an external API.
posted by tiamat at 6:03 AM on January 27

tiamat - Thanks for the confirmation. I'll ask in the developer forums,but it sounds like a long shot at best.
posted by your mildly obsessive average geek at 6:29 PM on January 28

For anyone who comes across this AskMe, a tangential update - FoxyProxy have released a new Pro version (that costs 15 USD).

The big feature of the FoxyProxy Pro version is that proxies can be "tagged" to a particular IP address of your PC - so one proxy (at work) I "tag" to my office IP range and the other proxy (which is actually a direct connection) is tagged to the IP range at home. With this, I can use Firefox without having to enable/disable proxies.
posted by your mildly obsessive average geek at 12:21 AM on April 27