@Chromium Team: please provide usable error messages

Reorganizing a project I rewrote a part that previously included a source file via a script file to include it via XMLHttpRequest and BOOM, my code suddenly imploded on Chrome during local testing.

What’s so bad about it is that it imploded with a cryptic error message “XMLHttpRequest Exception 101” which means a NETWORK_ERR has occured(a fairly broad error state that basically covers everything that has to do with loading).

I figured that this could be a security restriction and was able to find the appropriate bug #37586, but really: you don’t want to have your developers jumping through such hoops just to find out what an error message means. A simple error description such as “Security Error: Document may not request data from file:// protocol” would have spared me and probably a lot of other people a lot of searching.

In case you’ve encountered the same issue: The solution is to disable file:// protocol restrictions with the –allow-file-access-from-files command line switch.

One thought on “@Chromium Team: please provide usable error messages”

  1. Oh, that’s great news! I’ve been using the usual workaround of installing apache, but having a flag that disallows this is handy. Thanks for the tip!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.