diff --git a/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst b/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst
index f0ff3c77c..0ef3fb071 100644
--- a/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst
+++ b/docs/topics/downloader-middleware.rst
@@ -681,10 +681,9 @@ HttpProxyMiddleware
    * ``no_proxy``
 
    You can also set the meta key ``proxy`` per-request, to a value like
-   ``http://username:password@some_proxy_server:port``. Keep in mind
-   this value will take precedence over ``http_proxy``/``https_proxy``
-   environment variables, and it will also ignore ``no_proxy`` environment
-   variable.
+   ``http://some_proxy_server:port`` or ``http://username:password@some_proxy_server:port``.
+   Keep in mind this value will take precedence over ``http_proxy``/``https_proxy``
+   environment variables, and it will also ignore ``no_proxy`` environment variable.
 
 .. _urllib: https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib.html
 .. _urllib2: https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html
@@ -952,8 +951,16 @@ enable it for :ref:`broad crawls <topics-broad-crawls>`.
 HttpProxyMiddleware settings
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
+.. setting:: HTTPPROXY_ENABLED
 .. setting:: HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING
 
+HTTPPROXY_ENABLED
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+Default: ``True``
+
+Whether or not to enable the :class:`HttpProxyMiddleware`.
+
 HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
 
diff --git a/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/httpproxy.py b/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/httpproxy.py
index edc1c52ed..0d5320bf8 100644
--- a/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/httpproxy.py
+++ b/scrapy/downloadermiddlewares/httpproxy.py
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ except ImportError:
 from six.moves.urllib.parse import urlunparse
 
 from scrapy.utils.httpobj import urlparse_cached
+from scrapy.exceptions import NotConfigured
 from scrapy.utils.python import to_bytes
 
 
@@ -21,6 +22,8 @@ class HttpProxyMiddleware(object):
 
     @classmethod
     def from_crawler(cls, crawler):
+        if not crawler.settings.getbool('HTTPPROXY_ENABLED'):
+            raise NotConfigured
         auth_encoding = crawler.settings.get('HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING')
         return cls(auth_encoding)
 
diff --git a/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py b/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py
index 24714a7a8..cb88bc2bf 100644
--- a/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py
+++ b/scrapy/settings/default_settings.py
@@ -174,6 +174,7 @@ HTTPCACHE_DBM_MODULE = 'anydbm' if six.PY2 else 'dbm'
 HTTPCACHE_POLICY = 'scrapy.extensions.httpcache.DummyPolicy'
 HTTPCACHE_GZIP = False
 
+HTTPPROXY_ENABLED = True
 HTTPPROXY_AUTH_ENCODING = 'latin-1'
 
 IMAGES_STORE_S3_ACL = 'private'
diff --git a/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_httpproxy.py b/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_httpproxy.py
index dd09e4dd0..c77179ceb 100644
--- a/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_httpproxy.py
+++ b/tests/test_downloadermiddleware_httpproxy.py
@@ -1,11 +1,14 @@
 import os
 import sys
+from functools import partial
 from twisted.trial.unittest import TestCase, SkipTest
 
 from scrapy.downloadermiddlewares.httpproxy import HttpProxyMiddleware
 from scrapy.exceptions import NotConfigured
 from scrapy.http import Response, Request
 from scrapy.spiders import Spider
+from scrapy.crawler import Crawler
+from scrapy.settings import Settings
 
 spider = Spider('foo')
 
@@ -20,6 +23,11 @@ class TestDefaultHeadersMiddleware(TestCase):
     def tearDown(self):
         os.environ = self._oldenv
 
+    def test_not_enabled(self):
+        settings = Settings({'HTTPPROXY_ENABLED': False})
+        crawler = Crawler(spider, settings)
+        self.assertRaises(NotConfigured, partial(HttpProxyMiddleware.from_crawler, crawler))
+
     def test_no_enviroment_proxies(self):
         os.environ = {'dummy_proxy': 'reset_env_and_do_not_raise'}
         mw = HttpProxyMiddleware()