A closer look at NetShade for Mac

NetShade (v.4.0.1) makes your presence on the web anonymous by routing your connection through a proxy server and acting as the middle-man in your connection. The proxy server is the only one making connections to the sites you visit, and only the proxy’s IP address is seen by those sites.

After you enter the code, you might be told to configure you browser (in my case, Firefox) so that it can work with NetShade.

Welcome screen:

Direct Connection is chosen by default – that means that you’re visiting the websites from your own IP address. You can test and verify your connection:

Choose a public proxy by clicking on the small downward facing arrow on the “Public Proxy” button:

As with the direct connection, you can test and verify it. Of course, there is no guarantee that all of the public proxy servers will work or be accessible every time.

To additionally check that your computer is showing the proxy IP address to the websites, use a free online service for IP checking:

If you choose to use NetShade’s Proxy, you’ll be given the following information and a username/password combination to access it:

You can also add your own proxies. Just open the Proxy Manager and add them by pressing the “+” button at the very bottom and entering the values:

NetShade is a simplistic and effective piece of software for those Mac users that don’t want their IP address logged by sites – and even novices can use it without problems.

You can download it here.