It’s a shame Apple hasn’t added HTTP proxy support in the Safari app! I just spent an hour or so investigating compression addons and ad-blockers for squid thinking it would greatly improve the browsing speed on my iPhone. I found most of what I was looking for too, using Squid 3.1 there are addons for gzip compression and ad-blocking. However, I couldn’t find an addon that will re-compress images into lower quality but maybe that can be done with ImageMagick somehow?

Then it hit me: the damn phone only support http proxies over WLAN, and that’s not really when I would want to use it! Now I wonder if Apple has intentionally ignored proxy support in the Safari app to please the service providers? A smart http proxy could reduce the transferred text for each page view from a non compressing site by somewhere around 70-80%, removing ads will also reduce a larg amount of data, effectively reducing the end users data transfer fees and at the same time speed up page loads. If images were removed altogether we’re talking huge data savings but that comes with a major experience reduction.

But is there really no way we can manipulate what’s being downloaded over sometimes expensive 3G networks? YES there is! The iPhone does support VPN over 3G, and what can be enabled for a VPN connection? A proxy of course! Setting all this up is a bit of a hastle but we already have a VPN at work so I installed Squid on my “server” (the mac mini PPC in my closet that previously hosted this blog) and it worked very well over the VPN. Unfortunately the gzip compression addon doesn’t work for some reason but the ad-block works like a charm.

If you don’t have a VPN server there are a few available for Linux: OpenVPN, FreeS/WAN, Poptop.

Now if there was only an image re-compression plug-in for Squid, that would be awesome!

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