You bought a proxy. It came with four values, all of them correct. And half your software has nowhere to put two of them.
This is one of the most frustrating problems in proxy land, and it isn't your fault or your provider's. A lot of software was built assuming proxies are things a company runs on its own network, where nobody needs a login.
Where the problem shows up
Software that struggles with an authenticated proxy
| Where | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Windows proxy settings | No credential fields at all. Windows waits until traffic flows, then pops a login box, in whichever app happens to make the first request. |
Chrome --proxy-server | Takes a host and a port. Credentials written into the flag are ignored on purpose, not by accident. |
| Most games | Ignore the system proxy entirely. The ones with a proxy box usually want SOCKS5 and often have no login fields. |
| Torrent clients | Have their own proxy settings, which is good, but peer traffic needs SOCKS5 and an HTTP proxy silently covers only the tracker. |
| Older command line tools | Read http_proxy, which does carry a login, but on Windows many ignore the environment entirely. |
| Anything using system SOCKS5 | The Windows proxy setting is HTTP only. There is no SOCKS5 option to fill in. |
Behaviour verified across current versions, 2026.
Three fixes exist. They're genuinely different, and picking the wrong one wastes an afternoon.
Fix one: IP authorisation
Most providers, including us, let you swap the password for your own IP address. You tell the dashboard which address you'll connect from, it goes on an allow list, and the proxy then accepts you with no login at all.
Your proxy line drops to two parts:
The same proxy, once your IP is on the allow list
198.51.100.7Host:8080PortWith IP authorisation there is no username and no password to put anywhere.
Every problem on this page disappears, because there's nothing to authenticate. Windows stops prompting. Chrome's flag works. Software with no credential fields works.
The catch is real though. Home internet connections change IP address, sometimes on a router reboot and sometimes on a schedule your ISP decides. When yours changes, everything stops at once, and the symptom is total failure rather than a login prompt, which reads like the proxy died.
Use it when you're on a static IP, a server, or an office line. Avoid it on a laptop that moves between networks, because you'll be updating the allow list constantly.
Fix two: let the application handle it
Plenty of software does authenticated proxies perfectly well, and if the one you care about is on that list, just use its own settings rather than the system's.
Software that handles proxy logins properly
- 1
Firefox
Full proxy settings with its own credential prompt, and it remembers them. It ignores the Windows setting entirely, which is a feature here. See the Firefox guide.
- 2
Command line tools
curl, wget, git and most package managers take a full
http://user:pass@host:portURL with no fuss. curl is the fastest way to test that a proxy works at all. - 3
- 4
Antidetect browsers
AdsPower, Dolphin Anty, GoLogin and the rest all take a full proxy with a login, per profile. Proxies are the entire point of those tools, so they get this right.
If your whole workflow lives in one of those, stop here. You don't have a problem.
Fix three: a local relay
This is the one that works when nothing else does, and it's an old, boring, reliable trick.
You run a small program on your own computer that behaves like a proxy with no password. It listens on 127.0.0.1, accepts connections from anything on your machine, and forwards everything to your real proxy with the credentials attached. Your software talks to 127.0.0.1:8080 and never learns that a login exists anywhere.
What a local relay does
- 1
Your software connects to 127.0.0.1:8080
No username, no password. Every program can do this, including ones with no credential fields, because there is nothing to fill in.
- 2
The relay attaches your credentials
It adds the
Proxy-Authorizationheader your software could not send, and passes the request on. - 3
Your real proxy sees a normal authenticated request
Nothing changes on the provider's side. It's the same login it always wanted.
Why this solves the awkward cases specifically:
- Windows stops prompting, because the proxy it's pointed at genuinely has no password.
- Chrome's
--proxy-serverflag works, because it only ever needed a host and a port. - SOCKS5 becomes usable system wide. A relay that speaks SOCKS5 upstream and plain HTTP to your software bridges a gap Windows cannot bridge on its own.
- Every app on the machine shares one setting. Change proxy, restart the relay, and nothing else needs touching.
The one way to get this badly wrong
A relay listens without a password, which is safe on 127.0.0.1 because only your own machine can reach that address. Bind it to 0.0.0.0 or your LAN address and you have published an open proxy. Open proxies get found by automated scanners within minutes, and then strangers spend your traffic. If a tool lets you do that without an explicit flag and a warning, do not use that tool.
Which one to pick
Choosing between the three
| Feature | IP authorisation | Local relay |
|---|---|---|
| Works with software that has no login fields | yes | yes |
| Works when your IP address changes | no | yes |
| Works on a laptop that moves between networks | no | yes |
| Nothing extra to run | yes | no |
| Can bridge SOCKS5 into HTTP-only software | no | yes |
| Set up once and forget | no | yes |
On a server with a fixed address, IP authorisation is less to run and perfectly good. On anything that moves, or where you need SOCKS5 in software that only speaks HTTP, a relay is the one that keeps working.
Before you blame authentication
Worth ruling out first, because these produce identical symptoms and are far more common:
You're using the wrong credentials. Your provider dashboard login and your proxy login are separate accounts. Using the wrong pair gives 407 Proxy Authentication Required.
A trailing space came along with the password. Copying out of an email or a chat picks one up surprisingly often. The string looks perfect and the login fails.
The proxy is simply dead. A dead proxy and a rejected login look the same from inside a stalled browser. Paste it into our proxy checker first: it opens a real connection and tells you whether the proxy answered at all, which separates the two problems in about thirty seconds.
You typed the port into the address box. Covered in the proxy format guide, and still the most common mistake of all.