Why does Chrome ignore local jQuery cookies?

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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?

9 Answers

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.

Another possible cause is the path: "/", since you're not using a normal web URL, / probably doesn't mean much - try without setting the path at all.

As workaround you can use Tampermonkey with access to local files ( How to include Local htm pages in a Tampermonkey script? ) By that way you will use Tampermonkey's storage, and will be able to set and get your data by functions GM_getValue(data) and GM_setValue(data). I used that for my local HTML page, which i used as customizable alternative to Windows Explorer

But actually localStorage from Yuri's answer works perfect.

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