Comment 14 for bug 284250

This bug is not a duplicate of bug #556293! As was stated above this is to do with firefox's manner of using the gnome proxy settings. From what I have seen Google Chrome and Firefox interpret the rules very differently - one likes wildcards and the other likes the mask syntax.

We have been struggling for years with Ubuntu and proxy server support and it is a huge issue prohibiting general use in the enterprise. I think we need some new thinking:

If Ubuntu arrived out of the box with a squid proxy server setup in transparent mode with a virtual nic then no applications would need to know about proxy servers - that is how we fix it.