 <p>HTTP status codes are returned by webservers. Presumedly your local server returns 200 when you're doing this in Chrome, but node-webkit just returns 0 (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes" rel="nofollow">Unknown?</a>).</p> <p>Normally reading local files is restricted though. Does the code above actually produce the file contents? Even so, if you're trying to read files in node-webkit I would suggest using the <a href="http://nodejs.org/api/fs.html" rel="nofollow">node fs module</a> to access the filesystem directly.</p>