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:
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t=162549 [st=0] PAC_JAVASCRIPT_ERROR --> line_number = 382 --> message = "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected end of input" |
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. :)