Google Chrome redirecting localhost to https

Question

When I debug a Visual Studio project using Chrome the browser tries to redirect to the https equivalent of my web address. I do not have SSL enabled in the web project and the start URL is the http URL. When I debug using FireFox or IE I do not have this problem.

I did re-install Chrome which fixed the problem for a day. Without downloading any addons the problem happened again the next day.

What is making Chrome redirect localhost to https?

Network Inspect Shows: Request URL:data:text/html,chromewebdata Request Headers Provisional headers are shown User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36

No preview and no response data in those tabs.

Answer 1

This is not a solution, it's just a workaround.

1. Click on your visual studio project (top level) in the solution explorer and go to the properties window.

2. Change SSL Enabled to true. You will now see another port number as 'SSL URL' in the properties window.

3. Now, when you run your application (or view in browser), you have to manually change the port number to the SSL port number in the address bar.

Now it works fine as a SSL link

Answer 2

I also have been struggling with this issue. Seems that HSTS is intended for only domain names. So if you are developing in local machine, it much easier to use IP address. So I switched from localhost to 127.0.0.1

Answer 3

Another option would be to use something like https://github.com/rchampourlier/tunnelss

Sure it added another dependency / setup, but it also enables testing of https in dev, which could be nice.

I use RVM however to get tunnelss working I had to use sudo gem install tunnelss and sudo tunnelss

Answer 4

None of these worked for me. It started happening after a chrome update (Version 63.0.3239.84, linux) with a local URL. Would always redirect to https no matter what. Lost some hours and a lot of patience on this

What did worked after all was just changing the domain.

For what is worth, the domain was .app. Perhaps it got something to do? And just changed it to .test and chrome stopped redirecting it

Answer 5

@Adiyat Mubarak answer did not work for me. When I attempted to clear the cache and hard-reload, the page still redirected to https.

My solution: In the upper right-hand corner of the url bar (just to the left of the favorites star icon) there is an icon with an "x" through it. Right-click on that, and it will say something about "unsafe scripts", then there is an option to load them anyway. Do that.

Answer 6

This can be caused by a cached https redirect, and can be fixed by clearing the cache manually as in Adiyat Mubarak's answer.

But if you are visiting localhost you likely are a developer, in which case you will find a cache clearing chrome extension such as "classic cache killer" (see e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/classic%20cache%20killer?hl=en) useful in a variety of situations, and likely already have one installed.

So the quick fix is: Install a cache killer (if you don't have one already), turn it on, and reload the page. Done!