Full definition
An HTTP proxy speaks the HTTP protocol natively. Your client sends a normal HTTP request (e.g., `GET https://example.com/page HTTP/1.1`) to the proxy, and the proxy fetches the URL on your behalf and returns the response. For HTTPS, the client uses an HTTP CONNECT to establish a TLS tunnel through the proxy.
This is the default for almost all web scraping libraries — `requests`, `axios`, `fetch`, `urllib`. Configuration is typically a single environment variable (`HTTP_PROXY=http://user:pass@host:port`) or a parameter passed to the HTTP client.
The HTTP proxy can see and modify your request (in the case of plain HTTP) or just blindly tunnel it (in the case of HTTPS CONNECT). Most provider gateways operate as transparent proxies: they don't modify your traffic, they just route it through a pool IP.