Hi computer people! I know a lot of you will laugh at this and say “well, duh”. You may take your superior selves elsewhere. The rest of us need some help. Anyway, on to the eurekas.
I’ve been using Google Chrome as my primary browser for many many years. Before I made the switch I was a die-hard Firefox user. Before I bothered to finally figure out how to get Chrome to freaking open a local .html file for crying out loud, the only time I used Firefox was to do some cross browser QA or to open an .html file from my local files. It was a pain because I prefer troubleshooting stuff in Chrome because I’m used to it but when I’d have to launch the file in Firefox I’d grit my teeth, struggle through whatever task I was trying to complete and get out, ASAP.
I knew there must be a way to make Chrome do it but I just never bothered to figure it out. Until this morning. I had to deliver a Magento site’s header html.
As a shortcut, I saved page as and then opened the file in a code editor so I could get rid of all the stuff that wasn’t needed.
After gutting a ton of extraneous HTML, I had to check the page didn’t look like utter hell in a browser. So I launched the page in Firefox – as usual. And then it occurred to me that this was as good a time as any to finally figure out how to make Chrome open the file.
I searched for “open local files in chrome” and, after wading through some pretty heavy handed and, in my opinion, way overly technical solutions involving doing things via the command line or wiffle about file permissions, I eventually landed here.
The actual instructions provided in the article linked above didn’t work for me because I use a Mac. So instead of typing file:///C:/ in the address bar, I just typed file:/// then went to Users/<my user>. After that, I just had to navigate to the directory the file was, click on the file and Chrome opened it and now everyone is so happy they could die.