Chrome browser doesn't like *.loc domain without http://?

Google Chrome is pretty "smart" with this. It uses a list of known-good TLDs and assumes everything else is just a search term that happens to end in a dot followed with some characters.

99% of the time that's perfectly fine. It's "only" us developers and a few people with strange network setups that have to suffer for the good of the majority ;-)

You can try using .local as your TLD, as that's a defined domain for referencing local domain names (at least it's used in some mDNS systems).

The issue has been entered as #30636 in the Chromium bug tracker. One workaround that often (but not always) seems to work is to append / to your hostname. So try roses.loc/.

I've created a search engine with a keyword of 'l' (my local TLD is .l). The URL for the search engine is http://%s.l. Then, I simply type "l mysite" in the address bar and it takes me to mysite.l.