When I type http://www.google.co.uk
in the URL bar Firefox rewrites it as https://www.google.co.uk
. This is a problem for me as HTTPS is blocked on my network for content filtering purposes.
Until a few days ago this was not the case, but during some experimentation I seem to have visited the HTTPS version of the site once or twice and also had the HTTPS Everywhere addon installed for a time. Now, no matter what I do Firefox redirects there. Sometimes it doesn't; sometimes I load the browser and the HTTP version loads fine, but then the next time it's oddly trying HTTPS again and nothing can shift it until a few session restarts later. I don't understand why it seems to sporadically use HTTP and HTTPS.
I'm using Firefox 23.0 and Ubuntu 12.04.
I've tried a number of things so far:
- Setting
browser.urlbar.autoFill false
,browser.urlbar.autoFill.typed false
,browser.formfill.saveHttpsForms false
- Clearing everything from history
- Resetting Firefox and using safe mode
- Deleting all the profile data in
.mozilla
folder and creating a
new profile - Completely purging Firefox and deleting
.mozilla
,/etc/firefox
and reinstalling
How can I fix this so that Firefox just loads Google in non-HTTPS?
Maybe it's Google doing the redirect, but I just don't understand why it was fine until a few days ago, and also why it only does it sporadically.
Even when I try typing in nosslsearch.google.com
I get redirected to the HTTPS version!
Lastly, when I log into another user account on the computer, and try Firefox with Google I see no problems with redirects, just as it had always been until recently on the above account.
EDIT: I should also mention I am not logged into any Google account.
Best Answer
I noticed using Fiddler that sending HTTP requests to Google would always return the 302s you mention, redirecting me to the HTTPS url as long as a Firefox user agent string was included in the request header. This is my current user agent string using Firefox 24 on Windows 7 x64:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
So for me, a simple fix was to start using the User Agent Quick Switch add-on for Firefox. I changed my user agent string like this - just removed the
Firefox/24.0
at the end:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101
I'd guess a similar change to your Ubuntu user agent string would also do the trick, although there is an outside chance that it be problematic on another site.