Internet not working in Chrome but works fine in IE

Today, Internet browsing via Chrome stopped working at my office. IE was not affected, only Chrome. The error was just that the site couldn’t be reached.

I fired up Chrome and went to “chrome://net-internals/“. In the page that opened I went to the “Proxy” in the left sidepane and saw that although the original proxy settings were “auto detect” the effective proxy settings were “direct”. That didn’t make sense – Chrome was set the proxy settings of IE, but IE was working fine and detecting a proxy but Chrome wasn’t. A quick Google search showed me that if Chrome is having trouble finding a proxy, it resorts to a direct Internet connection. Seems to be by design. So why was Chrome having trouble finding a proxy? IE was set with a WPAD file location so I went to the “Events” in the side pane of “chrome://net-internals/” to see if it was having trouble finding the WPAD file. It didn’t, but there were errors like these:

The line referred to was the last line of the WPAD file so clearly it was reading it and there was something wrong with the syntax of the file. I opened up the file in Notepad++, set the language to JavaScript (so I get syntax highlighting and braces matching etc), and went through the various script blocks in the file. Sure enough one section had a missing ending brace “}” and that was tripping up Chrome. Not sure why IE was able to move past this error, but there you go. I added the missing brace and Chrome began working. :)