OK and presumably it does that by taking a request for an address A and
rewriting part of it so that it actually goes to B with some additional headers to indicate how to forward it.
edit: Apparently I've hit my HN rate limit so I can't reply! Thanks Dang.
As for the proxying, obviously something has to rewrite the address that the request is going to. Depending on the type of proxy (ex: HTTP CONNECT) you may also have an x-forwarded-by header set. It sounds like Chrome never allowed you to do this manually, cool TIL.