In Windows the Chrome browser uses your system wide proxy settings. This can be a problem if you have a need to run different browsers and/or applications. An example would be running a Secure Shell proxy to get through a content filtering firewall. To get around the Chrome system wide proxy settings, use a command line switch. Open or create a shortcut to Chrome/Chromium --proxy-server="socks5://127.0.0.1:8080" Replace 127.0.0.1 with your proxy address and 8080 with your proxy port.

I recently acquired an iPad 2 which I use mostly for surfing the web. I had no idea that you could not use browser extensions. Assuming you have an extra computer running on your network. One method of blocking ads (on your home network) is to use a web proxy like Privoxy. Privoxy has binaries for Windows, OS X, BSD and Linux. In the example below we are going to install and setup Privoxy on Ubuntu.