Google Chrome --allow-file-access-from-files disabled for Chrome Beta 8

Question

I have been developing an AJAX application using jQuery and Microsoft Seadragon technology.
I need to have access to the html5 canvas function toDataURL.

With Google Chrome, the same origin rule applies to this function which means that a page run locally (with the file:/// in the URL) failed to satisfy the same origin rule and an exception is thrown.

With Chrome 7, starting the application with --allow-file-access-from-files option, allows to call canvas.toDataURL() from local files.

However, it seems that starting the Chrome Beta 8 with the same option (--allow-file-access-from-files) does not allow the call canvas.toDataURL() on the local file.

Does Chrome gave up on the --allow-file-access-from-files option or it has just been disabled since it is a Beta release and not a full release?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Looking at the issues for this shows that the whole --allow-file-access-from-files thing was rushed.

1. "Firefox does it.."
2. "How can we do it?"
3. some time passes
4. "Here are the patches"
5. "Passes! On trunk wonder what happens in the next dev release"
6. "Ahhh it's broken" "Use the command line option" "ok"
7. "We shipped!"
8. "WTF guys? You broke all my stuff! Why didn't you tell us earlier?"
9. silence

On to your Problem
Indeed it seems that this is something special to the beta, I'm using Chrome 8.0.552.5 dev here and --allow-file-access-from-files works like expected, I've also tested this with Chromium 9.0.592.0 (66889) were it also works as expected.

I suspect there have been some changes on the dev branch. Unfortunately, finding something on chromium's issue tracker is nearly impossible.