I use .local for, well, my local network and I find that Chrome can't find them half the time (telling me that the server can't be found or that I don't have internet connection). Safari, Firefox and even command line tools find them without skipping a beat while Chrome insists that I'm offline.
I think the culprit is the internal DNS cache. If, for whatever reason it can't find the server once, then it gets stored in the cache as unreachable and needs a cache flush to fix. To add insult to injury, in previous versions of Chrome you could disable the internal DNS system, but apparently not anymore.
I use .local for, well, my local network and I find that Chrome can't find them half the time (telling me that the server can't be found or that I don't have internet connection). Safari, Firefox and even command line tools find them without skipping a beat while Chrome insists that I'm offline.
I think the culprit is the internal DNS cache. If, for whatever reason it can't find the server once, then it gets stored in the cache as unreachable and needs a cache flush to fix. To add insult to injury, in previous versions of Chrome you could disable the internal DNS system, but apparently not anymore.