Google Chrome Ignoring Hosts File

Question

Google Chrome is ignoring the settings in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts file. Both IE11 and Firefox are installed on the same machine and work as expected.

I've tried all the solutions I could find online including:

1. Open chrome://net-internals/#dns and click the Clear Hosts Cache button.
2. Go in Settings, Show Advanced Settings and uncheck the following three options: (X) Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors (X) Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar (X) Use a prediction service to load pages more quickly
3. Go in Settings, Show Advanced Settings, click the Clear Browsing Data button, selected Cached Images And Files from the beginning of time, and click Clear Browsing Data.
4. Restart Chrome.exe.
5. Restart the computer.
6. Make sure to add http:// to the front of the web address.
7. Make sure proxy settings are turned off
8. Run cmd.exe and run ipconfig /flushdns
9. Uninstall and reinstall Chrome

I'm at a loss... Is there anything I missed that I can try or check?

Answer 1

Seems that Chrome doesn't likes the following extensions for that kind of stuff:

.dev
.localhost
.test
.example
.app

Use .local and the problem seems to disappear.