AJAX in Chrome sending OPTIONS instead of GET/POST/PUT/DELETE?

Chrome is preflighting the request to look for CORS headers. If the request is acceptable, it will then send the real request. If you're doing this cross-domain, you will simply have to deal with it or else find a way to make the request non-cross-domain. This is why the jQuery bug was closed as won't-fix. This is by design.

Unlike simple requests (discussed above), "preflighted" requests first send an HTTP request by the OPTIONS method to the resource on the other domain, in order to determine whether the actual request is safe to send. Cross-site requests are preflighted like this since they may have implications to user data. In particular, a request is preflighted if:

  • It uses methods other than GET, HEAD or POST. Also, if POST is used to send request data with a Content-Type other than application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, or text/plain, e.g. if the POST request sends an XML payload to the server using application/xml or text/xml, then the request is preflighted.
  • It sets custom headers in the request (e.g. the request uses a header such as X-PINGOTHER)

Based on the fact that the request isn't sent on the default port 80/443 this Ajax call is automatically considered a cross-origin resource (CORS) request, which in other words means that the request automatically issues an OPTIONS request which checks for CORS headers on the server's/servlet's side.

This happens even if you set

crossOrigin: false;

or even if you ommit it.

The reason is simply that localhost != localhost:57124. Try sending it only to localhost without the port - it will fail, because the requested target won't be reachable, however notice that if the domain names are equal the request is sent without the OPTIONS request before POST.