D3.js loading local data file from file:///

You can by disabling the respective security mechanisms in your browser. I think it works in Opera by default, and you can start Chrome with the --allow-file-access-from-files command line flag to allow loading data from file://.

The best solution would be to run a server on your computer to make it work.

The simplest way to have a local web server, as explained here is to run this command in the directory where you have your source code:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888 &

Then just load the page http://localhost:8888