With ISPs, advertisers and malware ever keen to track online surfing habits,
it's become more important than ever to be able to preserve your privacy.
*NetShade* offers you this possibility by routing your connection through a
proxy server in a very slick, effective and easy to use application. As the
developers point-out, "Giving someone your IP address is the digital
equivalent of giving someone your home address" and if privacy is a concern,
you shouldn't be leaving it all over the net. NetShade prevents this by
acting as a "middle-man" in your connection. In reality, NetShade does
nothing more than link you to a list of publicly available *proxies* that,
with a little tinkering in your browser, you could access manually anyway.
However, NetShade makes the process a lot easier and it includes it's own
*private server* which is useful if the other proxies are unavailable or not
working very well. The private server is particularly fast and reliable. The
floating NetShade interface is very well presented and extremely easy to use.
You can select *Direct Connection, Public Proxy or NetShade Proxy* in a click
of the floating control panel. A globe revolves and *plants a flag where the
proxy you are currently using is coming from* which is another nice feature.
The *flag remains in your Dock* over the NetShade icon so you know which
country you are connected to. I also really like the way you can select which
country you want to connect to via a drop down menu on the Public Proxy
option. *Connections are established and disconnected very quickly* which is
unusual for a proxy application. The only slight drawback of NetShade is that
you need to do a *little configuring to make it work with Firefox*. The
configuration process is however really simple and only requires you
accessing your Firefox preferences, and changing the Network settings to work
with a system proxy. *NetShade looks great and is easy to use and this latest
release is a vast improvement on the previous version.*Download *NetShade
5.2* in Softonic
