Why does Chrome ignore local jQuery cookies?

Question

I am using the jQuery Cookie plugin (download and demo and source code with comments) to set and read a cookie. I'm developing the page on my local machine.

The following code will successfully set a cookie in FireFox 3, IE 7, and Safari (PC). But if the browser is Google Chrome AND the page is a local file, it does not work.

$.cookie("nameofcookie", cookievalue, {path: "/", expires: 30}); 

What I know:

• The plugin's demo works with Chrome.
• If I put my code on a web server (address starting with http://), it works with Chrome.

So the cookie fails only for Google Chrome on local files.

Possible causes:

• Google Chrome doesn't accept cookies from web pages on the hard drive (paths like file:///C:/websites/foo.html)
• Something in the plugin implentation causes Chrome to reject such cookies

Can anyone confirm this and identify the root cause?

Answer 1

Chrome doesn't support cookies for local files (or, like Peter Lyons mentioned, localhost*) unless you start it with the --enable-file-cookies flag. You can read a discussion about it at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=535.

*Chrome does support cookies if you use the local IP address (127.0.0.1) directly. so in the localhost case, that could be an easier workaround.

Answer 2

For local applications use localStorage in Chrome instead: http://people.w3.org/mike/localstorage.html