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SOCKS for expats – try ours on for a better browsing experience

Features 

If you’ve got your feet (and your browsing habits) planted in two different countries, you might want to try our SOCKS proxy – utilitarian but beautifully knitted together with our WireGuard® servers.

Let’s say you live in Japan but are originally from Canada. You want most applications on your computer to connect through a Tokyo-based VPN server. But you still want to access local Canadian news sites without the hassle of switching VPN locations when you do this.

Our implementation of the SOCKS proxy makes this possible because you can precisely specify where you want to use it. In this scenario, simply configure only your browser to be routed through a Canadian VPN server.

You can go one step further: designate one browser purely for your Canadian news feed and another one for Japanese browsing = Magic!

We offer fancy SOCKS

Some implementations of SOCKS proxies are outward facing, meaning that your traffic isn’t secure. But with ours, your traffic is always encrypted. This is because we establish the proxy inside our encrypted tunnel.

And if you forget to connect the Mullvad VPN app, connecting to the proxy also won’t happen which means your browser traffic won’t leak.

Another little benefit: you won’t experience as many of those annoying CAPTCHAs.

11 steps to SOCKS success

Ready to see the magic for yourself? Here’s how, using the Firefox desktop browser! (For other browsers, see our detailed SOCKS guide.)

First, choose your proxy server

  1. Go to our Servers page and choose a WireGuard® server in the country that you want to route your browser through.
  2. Click on the server to reveal the SOCKS5 proxy address.
  3. Copy the address up to and including “.net”, for example ca10-wg.socks5.mullvad.net.

Next, set up your browser

  1. In a Firefox browser window, click the menu button and choose Options.
  2. In the search box, type “socks”, then click on the Settings button in the results.
  3. Choose Manual proxy configuration.
  4. Next to SOCKS Host, paste the address you copied earlier.
  5. Next to Port, enter “1080”.
  6. Under this, choose SOCKS v5.
  7. Check the box for Proxy DNS when using SOCKS v5.
  8. Click OK.

Finally, experience the magic!

Now for the fun part.

  1. In your newly configured Firefox browser, open our Connection check page.
  2. Click on “Using Mullvad VPN” to expand the details.
  3. You should see that you are using the SOCKS proxy through the server you chose.
  4. For extra credit, open a different browser and repeat steps 1 and 2. This time, you should see the server that you have selected in the Mullvad VPN app. Mind = blown.

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"WireGuard" is a registered trademark of Jason A. Donenfeld.