After I updated to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, url links in other applications stopped working. Well, when I clicked on the links my google chrome browser would fire up properly, but it would stay stuck at the homepage and not be redirected to the link that I clicked on.

This was irritating me for days and I just could not figure out what was going wrong. I uninstalled and re-installed google chrome a number of times, removed the hidden ~/.config/google-chrome directory, on and on.

Just about the moment I was ready to give up completely and go back to firefox, I had an unexpected insight. The simple solution is just to do the following:

rm ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Probably something went wrong with the ubuntu upgrade whereby this file got leftover and wasn't deleted properly.