chromium behind proxy with gnome shell or gnome 3 on fedora 15

last week I installed chromium on my fedora system at my work. like many companies, there is a proxy and, changing the settings under System settings/Network/Network Proxy was uneffective. setting environment variables as http_proxy and https_proxy was not working as well. so, I needed a more hardcore approach.

I edited the file /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop and, in the line with “Exec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser %U” I just appended “–proxy-server=http://MY_PROXY_IP:MY_PROXY_PORT” at the end of line. note, you must replace the MY_PROXY_IP and the MY_PROXY_PORT according to your needs.

you must be careful with updates: it’s very unlikely, but this file can be updated and, suddenly, this proxy will cease to work.

UPDATE: alternatively, you can create a local copy of the file /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop, place it in your desktop and edit it with the proxy settings.

UPDATE 2: there is a far more elegant solution.

1. logged as root, edit the file /usr/bin/chromium-browser with following the command:

   gedit /usr/bin/chromium-browser

2. add the following lines on the line 75:

   # proxy settings
   CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --proxy-server=MY_PROXY_IP:MY_PROXY_PORT --proxy-bypass-list=127.0.0.1,localhost"

3. replace MY_PROXY_IP and MY_PROXY_PORT with the appropriate values and close and save the file.

and we’re done. of course, these are system-wide settings which can too be overwritten by an update, but I hope the next update will fix this issue with environment variables.