What is the max size of localStorage values?

Quoting from the Wikipedia article on Web Storage:

Web storage can be viewed simplistically as an improvement on cookies, providing much greater storage capacity (10 MB per origin in Google Chrome(https://plus.google.com/u/0/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/S5Q9HqDB8bh), Mozilla Firefox, and Opera; 10 MB per storage area in Internet Explorer) and better programmatic interfaces.

And also quoting from a John Resig article [posted January 2007]:

Storage Space

It is implied that, with DOM Storage, you have considerably more storage space than the typical user agent limitations imposed upon Cookies. However, the amount that is provided is not defined in the specification, nor is it meaningfully broadcast by the user agent.

If you look at the Mozilla source code we can see that 5120KB is the default storage size for an entire domain. This gives you considerably more space to work with than a typical 2KB cookie.

However, the size of this storage area can be customized by the user (so a 5MB storage area is not guaranteed, nor is it implied) and the user agent (Opera, for example, may only provide 3MB - but only time will tell.)

Actually Opera doesn't have 5MB limit. It offers to increase limit as applications requires more. User can even choose "Unlimited storage" for a domain.

You can easily test localStorage limits/quota yourself.

Here's a straightforward script for finding out the limit:

if (localStorage && !localStorage.getItem('size')) {
    var i = 0;
    try {
        // Test up to 10 MB
        for (i = 250; i <= 10000; i += 250) {
            localStorage.setItem('test', new Array((i * 1024) + 1).join('a'));
        }
    } catch (e) {
        localStorage.removeItem('test');
        localStorage.setItem('size', i - 250);            
    }
}

Here's the gist, JSFiddle and blog post.

The script will test setting increasingly larger strings of text until the browser throws and exception. At that point it’ll clear out the test data and set a size key in localStorage storing the size in kilobytes.

Find the maximum length of a single string that can be stored in localStorage

This snippet will find the maximum length of a String that can be stored in localStorage per domain.

//Clear localStorage
for (var item in localStorage) delete localStorage[item];

window.result = window.result || document.getElementById('result');

result.textContent = 'Test running…';

//Start test
//Defer running so DOM can be updated with "test running" message
setTimeout(function () {

    //Variables
    var low = 0,
        high = 2e9,
        half;

    //Two billion may be a little low as a starting point, so increase if necessary
    while (canStore(high)) high *= 2;


    //Keep refining until low and high are equal
    while (low !== high) {
        half = Math.floor((high - low) / 2 + low);

        //Check if we can't scale down any further
        if (low === half || high === half) {
            console.info(low, high, half);
            //Set low to the maximum possible amount that can be stored 
            low = canStore(high) ? high : low;
            high = low;
            break;
        }


        //Check if the maximum storage is no higher than half
        if (storageMaxBetween(low, half)) {
            high = half;
            //The only other possibility is that it's higher than half but not higher than "high"
        } else {
            low = half + 1;
        }

    }

    //Show the result we found!
    result.innerHTML = 'The maximum length of a string that can be stored in localStorage is <strong>' + low + '</strong> characters.';

    //Functions
    function canStore(strLen) {
        try {
            delete localStorage.foo;
            localStorage.foo = Array(strLen + 1).join('A');
            return true;
        } catch (ex) {
            return false;
        }
    }


    function storageMaxBetween(low, high) {
        return canStore(low) && !canStore(high);
    }

}, 0);

<h1>LocalStorage single value max length test</h1>

<div id='result'>Please enable JavaScript</div>

Note that the length of a string is limited in JavaScript; if you want to view the maximum amount of data that can be stored in localStorage when not limited to a single string, you can use the code in this answer.

Edit: Stack Snippets don't support localStorage, so here is a link to JSFiddle.

Results

Chrome (45.0.2454.101): 5242878 characters
Firefox (40.0.1): 5242883 characters
Internet Explorer (11.0.9600.18036): 16386 122066 122070 characters

I get different results on each run in Internet Explorer.