Chrome problem with reading local files

[cashaffer]

On my Linux box, Chrome refuses to load a local country file:

XMLHttpRequest cannot load file:///home/shaffer/IntlPop/US.js?_=1358178803733. Origin null is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

I have not encountered this problem elsewhere. I can load the local files fine on Firefox on Linux, and with either browser on Windows. And it always seems to work when served by a web server instead of locally.