When SharePoint 2013 Site With .Dev Extension Stops Working In Chrome

We have our SharePoint 2013 development environment with a SharePoint site – “http://oursharepointsite.dev”. We mostly use Google Chrome browser. Suddenly, in my development environment, the site stopped working, showing the following page.

Error to our SharePoint 2013 site with extension ".dev"
Figure 1: Error in our SharePoint 2013 site with the extension ".dev"

We were wondering what happened to the site suddenly. We tested in other browsers like IE and FIREFOX and surprisingly, the site was working in those browsers. Also, all settings were ok and seemed to be no issue there.

While looking for a solution, we noticed that our site was getting redirected to HTTPS - “https://oursharepointsite.dev” even though we have HTTP site since it is our dev environment. We were wondering why Chrome was doing so. So finally, after googling, we found that CHROME 63 forces .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS.

We verified the version of the Google Chrome browser and found that it was the latest version

Our CHROME version
Figure 2: Our CHROME version

Solution

We were really wondering why CHROME 63 forces .dev domains to HTTPS since for the application in development environment are having extension .dev domain. Currently, there is no option except only using other browsers – IE or FIREFOX.

In future or next time maybe, we can create the dev environment sites with some other extensions.

One more alternative was to enabling HTTPS for our site.

More derails

On December 7, Chrome 63 was released. CHROME 63 forces HTTPS on .dev domains. This is happening because of the new policy in CHROME 63 where Google forces https. The .dev is a top-level domain owned by Google and has been included into Chromes HSTS preload list. Therefore, all .dev sites will be loaded in HTTPS.

References

  • https://ma.ttias.be/chrome-force-dev-domains-https-via-preloaded-hsts/
  • https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/669923

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