This is for the following setup:
Chrome (any version up to 7)
Mac OS X (any version up to 10.6+)
SOCKS proxy enabled in OS X System Preferences.
As a matter of rule, I always leave my SOCKS5 proxy enabled. This is because I travel and use wifi all over the place, it’s much more secure to tunnel all my internet usage through a trusted server. I personally use “ssh -D localhost:8118″ from the command line to get that socks proxy.
Anyways, as a ruby on rails web developer it’s common for me to access http://localhost:3000/. Safari works fine. Firefox works fine. Except Chrome.
Chrome insists on always looking up the domain OR _ip address_. That’s right, even if you enter http://127.0.0.1/ chrome always checks the ip address against DNS. Firefox does the same thing, but Chrome always checks against the SOCKS proxy even for localhost!
Which breaks things.
The fix:
Add ip addresses like 127.0.0.1 to the bypass proxies list in the System Preferences. Also, click the box for the “exclude simple hostnames” option.
I hear that Firefox maintains it’s own bypass list, which is why this behavior doesn’t show up. Chrome doesn’t have this list..