Disabling the Same Origin Policy in Chrome

If you ever needed to circumvent the browsers Same Origin Policy (SOP) so you don’t need to add Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) headers just to test out an idea, here is a quick little hack to open a new instance of Chrome that will not enforce these security features:

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alias unsafe-chrome='/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --user-data-dir=~/Library/Application\ Support/Google/UnsafeChrome --disable-web-security 2> /dev/null'

The important options here are:

--disable-web-security - This will disable the Same Origin Policy
--user-data-dir=... - This launches a separate instance, with its own user data directory.
This prevents you from needing to close any current instances of chrome, otherwise running this command will just bring the existing instance into focus.

Another good thing about giving this instance its own user-data-dir is that you can give this instance its own settings. For example, this instance is not signed into my Google account and I’ve configured a bright red theme so I can easily tell the difference between my normal Chrome and my insecure Chrome!