Google-chrome – Google Chrome redirecting localhost to https

google-chrome

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.

Best Solution

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

enter image description here

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

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