Stop Chrome from changing URL from HTTP to HTTPS when I edit it in the address bar

Note: this is not a duplicate of How to stop an automatic redirect from “http://” to “https://” in Chrome

In Chrome 93 on Windows 7:

• I browse to http://example.net/a
• Chrome hides the protocol in the address bar, so I only see "example.net/a"
• I edit the URL to "example.net/b"
• This takes me to https://example.net/b while I expected to go to http://example.net/b

Is there a way to disable this extremely annoying behaviour?

Note that there is no HSTS at play here - if I query for "example.net" under chrome://net-internals/#hsts it says "Not found". It happens even in Incognito mode without any extensions. Does not happen in Firefox.

Solution 1:

This looks like a bug in the Chrome implementation for hiding the protocol.

If one right-clicks the address-bar and selects "Always show full URLs", the bug does not arrive and http is maintained in the URL.

The most you can do is signal the bug. For workaround, enable full URLs until (if) the bug is fixed.