Chrome was designed to be as simple and easy-to-use as possible; part of this initiative involved being immediately compatible with most corporate set-ups (eg, IE users on a company intranet) so a decision was made to use Windows' proxy configuration settings out of the box.<p>You can actually override the proxy settings yourself via command line switches, however-- look through this page and search for "proxy": <a href="http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/" rel="nofollow">http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/</a>