I am getting too many DNS errors like “404 No Such Domain”. Why can Privoxy do this better?
There are potentially several factors here. First of all, the DNS resolution is done by the underlying operating system — not Privoxy itself. Privoxy merely initiates the process and hands it off, and then later reports whatever the outcome was and tries to give a coherent message if there seems to be a problem. In some cases, this might otherwise be mitigated by the browser itself which might try some work-arounds and alternate approaches (e.g adding “www.” to the URL). In other cases, if Privoxy is being chained with another proxy, this could complicate the issue, and cause undue delays and timeouts. In the case of a “socks4a” proxy, the socks server handles all the DNS. Privoxy would just be the “messenger” which is reporting whatever problem occurred downstream, and not the root cause of the error. In any case, versions newer than 3.0.3 include various improvements to help Privoxy better handle these cases.
