Squid offers a rich access control, authorization and logging environment to develop web proxy and content serving applications. Squid offers a rich set of traffic optimization options, most of which are enabled by default for simpler installation and high performance.

Squid is based on the Harvest Cache Daemon developed in the early 1990's. It was one of two forks from the codebase after the Harvest project ran to completion. (The other fork being what became Netapp's Netcache.)

The Squid project was funded by an NSF grant (NCR-9796082) which covered research into caching technologies. The ircache funding ran out a few years later and the Squid project continued through volunteer donations and the occasional commercial investment.

Squid is currently being developed by a handful of individuals donating their time and effort to building current and next generation content caching and delivery technologies. An ever-growing number of companies use Squid to save on their internet web traffic, improve performance, deliver faster browsing to their end-clients and provide static, dynamic and streaming content to millions of internet users worldwide.

What's New:

The most important of these new features are:

  • Helper protocol extensions
  • SSL Server Certificate Validator
  • Store-ID
  • TPROXY Support for OpenBSD 5.1+ and FreeBSD 9+
  • Transaction Annotations
  • Multicast DNS