google-chrome
We can enable/disable smart quotes for many apps by going to Edit → Substitutions. However, In Google Chrome, “Substitutions” does not exist. When searching online, though, it seems that it might’ve existed at some point, as I find multiple posts on how to disable the feature.
Is it no longer available (and if so why) or is it something on my side?
Enabling "Warn Before Quitting" should prevent that from happening. You can find that option in the Chrome menu in the menubar.
When enabled, you need to hold down ⌘+Q for a bit before it actually quits.
As you may know Google Chrome runs as a multi-process application. You have your initial "Google Chrome" process that manages the UI and plays "host" to a number of other processes. A new "renderer" process is created for each tab you open in Chrome, a "plugin" process for each extension you install, and there is a separate "GPU" process for the code that talks to the system's GPU. Each of these other processes appears in Activity Monitor as a "Google Chrome Helper" process.
To make Chrome more secure, the renderer processes run in a sandbox. They are only able to talk to the network through the host process and can only talk to specific files (for example, fonts and ColorSync profiles). They are also prevented from talking to other processes in the system, which is what causes these log messages. The renderer processes are trying to talk to the launchserviced and windowservice processes, but being prevented from doing that because of their sandbox.
This bug was resolved by a software engineer on Google's Chrome Security team with a commit in February 2014. Removing this one line of code resolved the problem.
[NSApplication sharedApplication];
Amongst other things, calling the sharedApplication method opens a connection between an application and OS X's WindowServer, which you can see failing in the CGSLookupServerRootPort error.
The intention was for Chrome to call this method to "warm up" certain resources before enabling the sandbox; gaining access to certain files, processes or network resources before the sandbox restrictions fell in place. However it seems that at some point this attempt started failing, resulting in these errors in the log. My guess is that Apple considered this "warming up" an attempt to cheat the sandbox and started clamping down on it.
If I'm reading correctly this change reached the stable release channel with an update of Google Chrome to 34.0.1847.131 in April 2014.
Interestingly the Chrome team had been discussing removing these calls to the sharedApplication method back in October 2013 and even discussed removing Cocoa entirely from the renderer processes as a goal back in 2009.
On a related note, Apple released a security fix in April 2014 to resolve a bug where "WindowServer sessions could be created by sandboxed applications."
Best Answer
As claimed by this issue, text substitution appears to have been disabled due to a bug:
Another issue is open to track progress on the feature.