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16.0.1 forces unwanted https redirect

  • 4 replies
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  • 10 views
  • Last reply by Ruark

Ruark
Ruark
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A friend of mine and I have worked over a year on a web site project. Now we're finding that Firefox automatically redirects its URL to an https address with a 404 Not Found error. If you type in http://www.sitename.com, www.sitename.com or sitename.com and hit Enter, it redirects to https://www.sitename.com. If you add a closing "/" before hitting Enter, it doesn't happen.

When our new web site is released, we're very concerned that new users running Firefox 14.0+ will try to access it, encounter this problem, and leave. There are fixes on my personal computer that would probably prevent it, but that's not the real solution here. Anybody?

A friend of mine and I have worked over a year on a web site project. Now we're finding that Firefox automatically redirects its URL to an https address with a 404 Not Found error. If you type in http://www.sitename.com, www.sitename.com or sitename.com and hit Enter, it redirects to https://www.sitename.com. If you add a closing "/" before hitting Enter, it doesn't happen. When our new web site is released, we're very concerned that new users running Firefox 14.0+ will try to access it, encounter this problem, and leave. There are fixes on my personal computer that would probably prevent it, but that's not the real solution here. Anybody?

Chosen solution

Yes, I found the problem. I searched the history and about a year and a half ago, for some unfathomable reason, I accessed, or attempted to access, that page with an https URL, probably accidentally. Firefox never forgot it. I deleted that line from the History, and now the problem's solved. Moral, if this is happening to you: search the history.

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All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
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You can check if it helps to set the Boolean pref browser.urlbar.autoFill to false on the about:config page.

See "Prevent Firefox from automatically completing URLs":

Ruark
Ruark Question owner
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Thanks for the help, Cor-el - but as I said, that really doesn't solve the problem. It fixes the issue on MY computer, but we're more concerned with customers out there not being able to access the site. They'll type in the URL to check it out, get a 404 error, then vanish.

cor-el
cor-el
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This can happen if you've ever visited a page on that site via a secure connection.

  • bug 769994 - Inline autocomplete selects HTTPS domain against HTTP domain by default
Ruark
Ruark Question owner
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Chosen Solution

Yes, I found the problem. I searched the history and about a year and a half ago, for some unfathomable reason, I accessed, or attempted to access, that page with an https URL, probably accidentally. Firefox never forgot it. I deleted that line from the History, and now the problem's solved. Moral, if this is happening to you: search the history.