Privoxy and Polipo

The Tor bundle used to be Tor and Privoxy. Now it is Tor plus Polipo.

AIUI both Privoxy and Polipo are HTTP proxies which do two things. They add a form of cleaning to all HTTP / HTTPS traffic that goes to the client from the web servers and they also ensure that DNS requests from the browser go through them (through 811 and are then passed on to Tor (through 9050) preventing "leakage" since Tor is a SOCKS proxy (SOCKS 5) which cannot handle DNS requests.

Does that make sense?

I am also wondering what the differences are between Privoxy and Polipo and why the Tor people now bundle Polipo rather than Privoxy?

Thanks.

 

bump...

 

because Polipo seems better at the moment
http://www.mail-archive.com/or-talk@freehaven.net/msg11474.html

 

Basically Polipo is faster and is primarily made for Tor. Privoxy has many other uses and is not optimized for Tor.

 

Polipo does pipelining which is more effective connection-wise, while Privoxy does not, but Privoxy can be used in conjunction with Polipo as it can provide some more filtering in a complementary fashion - but, that may slow up the process.

-- Tom