How to stop redirect from http:// to https://

Question

My library's OPAC (online public access catalog) website doesn't currently use HTTPS. Trying to view it with a secure connection 'crashes' it regardless of browser. However once I accidentally tried to visit the site via HTTPS and now it automatically tries to serve me the secure version no matter what I do.

I've had the same problem in Chrome for a while, and while I can use the solution presented in this similar question and it will fix it for a little while by my next session the HTTP to HTTPS redirect is back in chrome.

For that reason I've been using Firefox mostly until today when I accidentally pasted an HTTPS link to the website into Firefox now Firefox will only serve the HTTPS version as well.

Solution

Exit Firefox and edit the file

/Users/Chloe/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxx.default-999999/SiteSecurityServiceState.txt

Delete the line with your domain in it. Then restart Firefox. That will stop the redirection. That file is like Chrome's chrome://net-internals/#hsts.

The xxx and 999 will be random letters and numbers. The path is for Windows. Use Menu > Help > Troubleshooting Information > Profile Folder to find where your profile is located. In Linux the file is

/home/<USER>/.mozilla/firefox/profile.default/SiteSecurityServiceState.txt

Comments

[Tech-IO]

Maybe this might help a bit, about:config - browser.urlbar.autoFill (false) ?

[Nick Hopkins]

@Tech-IO Nope...

[Tech-IO]

Or maybe using an add-on e.g. addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/noredirect But you may find an add-on by your self, just search for no redirect or no redirection.

[Putnik]

have you tried to clear everything (ctrl-shift-del)?

[Adrien]

The redirect is returned by the server. You can't control that from the client.

[Nick Hopkins]

@Adrien Nope. As I mentioned I have been able to visit the HTTP version for a while in FF, but can't access in Chrome for some time. For the moment I can use IE or Opera but I'm running out of browsers.

[Adrien]

Maybe it's not a redirect then, as the status code 301 and 302 come from the server and cause the client to re-request the URI specified in the Location header of the 301/302 response. It could be an HSTS thing where the site indicates a preference for https that FF is remembering?

[lyrica]

Wow, very useful. Curious, how you were able to figure out that this is where such is stored?

[Chloe]

@Coldblackice I probably knew where Firefox settings were and used find AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles -type f | xargs grep domain.com in CygWin bash shell.