Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Google Chrome, Google Desktop & corporate proxies

So, my work internet proxy configuration (c/o Windows control panel..) doesn't allow localhost access.  Which means Google Desktop doesn't work with Chrome, since Chrome uses the Windows internet configuration.

Solution#1 - simply update the Windows proxy configuration to ignore the automatic config (via PAC file) that work gives me, and manually configure the same proxy but add an exception for localhost.  That works.


Then some BOFH decides to push out the proxy configuration (somehow - XP profile?) much more frequently than they were.  Such that every hour or so, my lovely manual configuration of Chrome (ie the Windows one) is reset to use the automatic (no localhost!) proxy configuration.

Solution #2 - use Firefox as default browser, since this (in a sensible fashion) lets me manually set the proxy configuration just the way I like it.

Oh, and the Chrome command line switch (--proxy-server=proxy:port) doesn't work either - can't manage the exception for localhost, and thus Google Desktop.

3 comments:

Merzavets said...

FYI, Google Chrome do manage proxy exceptions with
-–proxy-bypass-list=”localhost;127.0.0.1:8080″
command-line switch.

Neil said...

Fantastic. Unfortunately, not in a position to test it.

http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/network-settings

and they're noted there (assuming they're all implemented)

thanks!

Früv said...

I managed to fix this by changing the following registry setting -

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop\use_localhost

By default it is set to 0. Change it to 1 and GDS will use http://localhost:xxxx/xxxxxxxx instead of http://127.0.0.1:xxxx/xxxxxxxx