I'm using Chrome on Windows. FF works fine. This is on both SO and Meta. It worked just a few days ago. It's been reproduced by a few other people on Chrome in chat.
So, I can browse through my files, but no matter which file I select in which directory, the uploader shows it as if it's from the fakepath directory. The image name is correct though.
WHATWG says this is to be expected and related to HTML5.
The original plan was to just have the filename. Unfortunately, it turns out that if you do that, there are certain sites that break, because they expect the path (and they expect a Windows path, no less). This is why Opera and IE8 return a fake path -- not because HTML5 says to do it. In fact I made HTML5 say it because they were doing it.
(I would expect Firefox, Safari, and Chrome to follow suit; Firefox for compatibility, and Safari and Chrome for privacy.)
So if you don't see it, your browser is most likely a step behind the cycle.
Since we got rid of the fake filename input box, this is no longer an issue.
I believe this is a security feature of chrome. It does that at other sites too. You don't precisely want arbitrary people (not saying SE is arbitrary) seeing your directory structure, after all.
C:\Documents and Settings\Sam\My Documents\My Pictures\crash.png and /home/naesten/hacking/haskell/hell.hs both reveal a username, which might be undesirable...
Following up on waffle's response, a change like the following should work in all of the supported browsers:
$("#filename-input").change(function() {
$("#shadow-filename").val(this.files && this.files.length ?
this.files[0].name : this.value.replace(/^C:\\fakepath\\/i, ''));
})
...though I forget if IE7 exposes the real path to the file. If it does, the replace regex is insufficient, but displaying the real full path in that case seems harmless (from a "don't confuse the user" perspective) anyway.
C:\fake_path\.
I may parse out the filename in javascript so we don't show fakepath, as it can cause confusion.
Nonetheless, the uploader works fine.
