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git cloned test.html did not work with latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari for me, yet yours does. I find it strange that there's some policy more restrictive on local content than on remote one, provided yours work perfectly.

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Chrome does not allow scripts to access files on a local filesystem unless you specifically tell it to do so by starting it with --disable-web-security as an argument. See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40787 for a discussion (and a lot of frustrated people).

To simply start an arbitrary HTTP server to serve up files in a directory I use python's SimpleHTTPServer. This works on most Linux and Mac boxes as they package python along with the distribution or the OS.

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

This serves the files off the current folder under port 8000.

Something similar for Node.js: https://github.com/balupton/simple-server

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