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

I never figured out the root of the problem however I was able to fix this problem. I deleted the Google Chrome app cache folder which solved the problem.

C:\Users[users]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome

Answer 2

I believe this is caused by HSTS - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security

If you have (developed) any other localhost sites which send a HSTS header...

eg. Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload

...then depending on the value of max-age, future requests to localhost will be required to be served over HTTPS.

To get around this, I did the following.

• In the Chrome address bar type "chrome://net-internals/#hsts"
• At the very bottom of a page is QUERY domain textbox - verify that localhost is known to the browser. If it says "Not found" then this is not the answer you are looking for.
• If it is, DELETE the localhost domain using the textbox above
• Your site should now work using plain old HTTP

This is not a permanent solution, but will at least get it working between projects. If anyone knows how to permanently exclude localhost from the HSTS list please let me know :)

UPDATE - November 2017

Chrome has recently moved this setting to sit under Delete domain security policies

UPDATE - December 2017 If you are using .dev domain see other answers below as Chrome (and others) force HTTPS via preloaded HSTS.

Answer 3

I am facing the same problem but only in Chrome Canary and searching a solution I've found this post.

one of the next versions of Chrome is going to force all domains ending on .dev (and .foo) to be redirected to HTTPs via a preloaded HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) header.

{ "name": "dev", "include_subdomains": true, "mode": "force-https" },
{ "name": "foo", "include_subdomains": true, "mode": "force-https" },

So, change your domains.

Answer 4

from https://galaxyinternet.us/google-chrome-redirects-localhost-to-https-fix/

None of the option fixes worked for me, for fixing https://localhost:3000, this did.

click and hold Reload Button and select Empty Cache and Hard Reload, this seems to only be an option on localhost

Answer 5

Piggybacking off Adiyat Mubarak

Could not hard refresh as it was just refreshing on https. Follows some of the same steps.

1. Open chrome developer tools (ctrl + shift + i)
2. Network Tab at the top
3. Click Disable cache checkbox at the top (right under network tab for me).
4. Refresh page (while the developer tools is still open)

Answer 6

That's the fastest solution today (17-3-2018):

Close all Chrome tabs / windows and run on your command line this: (or add it as a shortcode)

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --ignore-certificate-errors