Taskbar Icon Launches Chrome Proxy instead of Vivaldi

floweringmind

Have no idea why this is happening. But if I pin Vivaldi to the taskbar and I try to launch Vivaldi by that icon on the taskbar, it launches Chrome.
I uninstalled Chrome and now it gives the error that it can't find chrome_proxy.exe. Which allowed me to browse and select the Vivaldi exe. Now it works.

Might be an issue that I downloaded Chrome when I first installed Windows through Edge,

robert.brandso

Same issue here. Did you find a solution?

Ayespy

@robert-brandso This literally was reported something like two or three years ago, but has not been seen recently. I should suspect that if you delete the taskbar icon, open Vivaldi from the desktop and then pin the resulting taskbar icon, it would stop happening. That is happens is a system corruption - not a Vivaldi trait.

LonM

@manek775 if you open the task manager, is it definitely Vivaldi that is running?

LukeT9

This post is deleted!

Biggsis

Same issue here "Cant find chrome_proxy.exe", whenever I try to pin Vivaldi to the taskbar. Chrome IS installed, no adware installed, clean system.

svott

I had the same problem as described here. It's a fresh install of Windows 10 build 1809. Chrome 74 was installed first, then Vivaldi 2.5. I pinned Vivaldi to the task bar. The next time I launched Vivaldi via the pinned shortcut, it said the shortcut was broken and offered to find a link to chrome_proxy.exe. After I accepted, it of course launched Chrome instead of Vivaldi. The Vivaldi icon remains in the task bar, not the Chrome icon.

The shortcut to Vivaldi in the start menu was unaffected. It still launched Vivaldi. To fix the problem, I copy-pasted the Vivaldi shortcut target from the start menu icon into the shortcut that was pinned to the task bar, overwriting the chrome_proxy.exe value.

Darthagnon

I had exactly the same thing happen to me. I had Vivaldi Dev Snapshot installed, then I installed Vivaldi Stable, and pinned Stable to the taskbar. Clicking on Stable's taskbar icon gave a message about a missing chrome_proxy.exe. I solved it by (1) pinning the Start Menu Pin of Vivaldi Stable to the taskbar (via right click) and (2) uninstalling Vivaldi Dev Snapshot.

NB Vivaldi Snapshot and Stable currently will attempt to use the same profile folder, which could be considered a bug in itself (it causes no apparent problems until uninstall, as I discovered when I uninstalled Dev, selected "delete browsing data" and it deleted it from Stable, since they were using the same profile folder.

I reckon the chrome proxy problem is something to do with Vivaldi not registering its installations properly, i.e. they're registered with no difference between Chrome, Vivaldi Dev Snapshot and Vivaldi Stable, so that when you try to launch one of them, Windows gets confused. (Portable installation can mitigate this issue, but still, shouldn't be present).

Ayespy

@Darthagnon said in Taskbar Icon Launches Chrome instead of Vivaldi:

NB Vivaldi Snapshot and Stable currently will attempt to use the same profile folder,

That should never happen. It's not possible under normal circumstances - unless you somehow install them in the same folder, but with different .exe files - which takes some gymnastics, install one as all user and one as per user, but use both of them as the same user, or force an install to a directory other than default one, while having both versions installed the "same" (ie, both per user, or both all users, but not in the proper locations).

Normally, if you install stable and snapshot under the same criteria, the most recent install will replace the earlier install, irrespective of version.

billysielu

Reproduction steps as per: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/37249/sometimes-pin-to-taskbar-can-create-a-shortcut-with-the-wrong-path/2

Install Vivaldi
Close Vivaldi.
Double-click the default Vivaldi icon on your desktop.
Pin to Taskbar.
Close Vivaldi
Delete icon from desktop
Click icon on Taskbar.
This happens: https://i.imgur.com/hYCRnGB.png

Ayespy

@billysielu Can't make that happen here.

aQaSoft

@tom-morton said in Taskbar Icon Launches Chrome instead of Vivaldi:

Unpinning and pinning doesn't work, have tried creating a new shortcut and pinning that, doesn't work.

Same scenario, clean install of Win 10 Pro 64, v. 1809, downloaded Vivaldi and installed, nothing else. Then, after pinning to taskbar, the same "chrome_proxy" error happens.

Workaround: with Vivaldi opened, after been pinned to taskbar, right click on the taskbar over vivaldi and choose "New window". Then you will have two taskbar buttons, unpin and pin the second one and voilá... the error is gone. Who knows.

fortifel

Having the same issue - cannot find chrome_proxy.exe

Pathduck

I can't reproduce this on 2.6.1546.4 - I'm guessing Chrome actually needs to be installed on the PC for this to even happen? Or maybe just an issue with 2.5 fixed in latest snapshot?

Have you tried looking at the created shortcut by right-clicking it, right-click again on the app. icon and select properties. You can see where the shortcut points to, and edit it to fix the issue as well.

Does it try to find chrome_proxy.exe in the Vivaldi installation folder or somewhere else?

LonM

@Pathduck I have chrome installed as well and I've never come across this issue (yet).

E.T.

I had this issue in the latest snapshot (2.6.1554.13, 64-bit), but it got away after I did clean reinstall of Vivaldi. I guess something got corrupted after I copy-pasted files between two user profiles.

snadge

I can confirm this is happening to me on Windows 10 x64 1903 (May update) with the latest Vivaldi Portable installed (set as default browser) in a RAM drive with my other browsers (Chrome NOT installed - Firefox, Opera and Tor are), my other browsers work just fine with the shortcuts - I did try locating the vivaldi.exe and first time it didnt work, second time it DID start working but after rebooting is now back to norm.

STATS:

Vivaldi 2.5.1525.48 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
Revision 29398d382527041597792325909ec48e07e1f5a6
OS Windows 10 OS Build 18362.145
JavaScript V8 7.4.288.28
Flash 32.0.0.192 C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\pepflashplayer64_32_0_0_192.dll
User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3729.172 Safari/537.36 Vivaldi/2.5.1525.48
Command Line "Z:\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe" --vivaldi-standalone --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --ppapi-flash-path="C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\pepflashplayer64_32_0_0_192.dll" --save-page-as-mhtml -- https://login.vivaldi.net/profile/id/verify?confirmation=d06d3f85-0c29-45c0-a3a2-9fad2d43f00d&userstoredomain=VIVALDI.NET&username=snadge&tenantdomain=carbon.super
Executable Path Z:\Vivaldi\Application\vivaldi.exe
Profile Path Z:\Vivaldi\User Data\Default
Variations d74ef32b-ca7d8d80

jasoncbraatz

Re: Taskbar Icon Launches Chrome Proxy instead of Vivaldi

This is how you fix the vivaldi chrome_proxy.exe issue when pinning it to the taskbar:

fix the vivaldi chrome_proxy.exe issue

..what's happening is that the desktop shortcut points to the correct .exe file, but once it's pinned to the taskbar, it changes to chrome_proxy.exe . I believe this is a setting that the Vivaldi team could fix, as I believe that pinning to the taskbar in Win10 (can) have a different .exe or .dll attached to it, and it appears that they haven't changed the defaults from the chromium engine.

Hope this helps,
@jasonCbraatz

Ayespy

@jasoncbraatz I'd say that makes sense, but it has never happened to me on any of my Win10 machines, with any Vivaldi install.

alexdante

I've just done a clean install of Windows 10. No Chrome is present on this system.

Installed Vivaldi and ran it. Pinned it to the taskbar. Trying to relaunch it from there gives the chrome_proxy issue.

So: Clean system. No Chrome. No pre-existing settings. Same error.