Smart Quotes Can Break a Chrome Proxy Desktop Entry
Keep typographic quotation marks out of a desktop entry’s Exec arguments when supplying Chrome’s proxy-server flag.
A note-taking application can replace ordinary quotation marks with “smart quotes.” Those characters are text, rather than the double-quote delimiter defined for a desktop entry’s Exec line.
A simple proxy argument with no spaces needs no quotation marks:
Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --proxy-server=http://proxy.example.net:8080 %UKeep the executable path used by the existing entry. An HTTP URL built from the HTTP proxy list can replace the sample endpoint when public-proxy browsing is permitted. %U is a desktop-entry field code for supplied URLs; it is not part of the proxy address.
If quoting is needed elsewhere in the command, use the ordinary ASCII double quote and the Desktop Entry specification’s escaping rules. Exec is parsed as an executable and arguments, rather than as a shell script.
Inspect the literal saved characters when a copied launcher behaves differently from a typed command. A visually similar punctuation mark can become part of the argument passed to the browser.