What are SOCKS5 proxies and how they compare to HTTP proxies?

SOCKS5 is the latest protocol version of SOCKS network routing protocol used in web proxies.

SOCKS5 is an extension of the SOCKS protocol that supports advanced networking technologies, such as the UDP protocol and IPv6. Though so do modern HTTP and HTTPS protocols.

In web scraping, proxy protocol doesn't have much of an impact though socks5 proxies tend to be more reliable compared to the HTTP counterpart. When choosing a proxy for your scraper it's important to consider client support as while SOCKS5 protocol is considered to be better it's harder to implement and not always available.