== Clearing cached HTTP redirections or HSTS status in Firefox As far as I know, all browsers cache (or memorize) HTTP redirections, especially ([[allegedly RespectingRedirectsDownside]]) permanent ones, including ones that push you from one site to another. Browsers all also remember the [[HSTS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security]] status for websites, and in fact this is the entire point of HSTS. This is great in theory, but sometimes it goes wrong in practice ([[as I've noted before BrowsersAndMemorizedRedirects]]). For example, someone believes that they have a properly set up general HTTPS configuration for a bunch of sites, so they wire up an automatic permanent redirection for all of them, and then it turns out that their TLS certificates aren't set up right so they turn the HTTPS redirection off and go back to serving the sites over HTTP. In the mean time, you've visited one site and your Firefox has a death grip on the HTTP to HTTPS redirection, which very definitely doesn't work. Such a cached but broken HTTP to HTTPS redirection recently happened to me in my main Firefox instance, so I set out on an expedition to find out how to fix it. The usual Internet advice on this unfortunately has the side effect of completely clearing your history of visited URLs for the site, which isn't something that I'm willing to do; [[my browser history is forever BrowserHistoryForever]]. Fortunately there's a different way to do it, which I found in [[this superuser.com answer https://superuser.com/questions/467999/clear-301-redirect-cache-in-firefox/471376#471376]]. The steps I'm going to use in the future are: * get yourself a new, blank tab (although any source of a link to the site will work, such as [[my home page BookmarksAlternative]]). * call up the developer tools Network tab, for example with Ctrl-Shift-E or Tools → Web Developer → Network. * tick the 'Disable Cache' tickbox. * enter the URL for the site into the URL bar (or otherwise go to the URL). This should give you an unredirected result, or at least force Firefox to actually go out to the web server and get another redirection, and as a side effect it appears to clear Firefox's memory of the old redirection. * turn the cache back on by unticking the 'Disable Cache' tickbox. When I did this, it seemed necessary to refresh or force-refresh the page a few times with the cache disabled before it really took and flushed out the cached HTTP redirect. (Apparently you can also do this by clearing only the cache through the History menu, see for example [[this answer https://superuser.com/questions/467999/clear-301-redirect-cache-in-firefox/1284597#1284597]]. I didn't use this for various reasons, but it does appear to work. This presumably has the side effect of clearing all of your cache, for everything, but this may be tolerable.) While I was trying to solve this issue I also ran across some pages on how to delete a memorized Firefox HSTS entry (without deleting your entire history for the site). The easiest way to do this is to shut down Firefox, find your profile directory, and then edit the file _SiteSecurityServiceState.txt_ that's in it. This is a text file with a straightforward one site per line format; find the problem site in question and just delete the entry. (People with more understanding of the format of each line might be able to de-HSTS a site's entry, but I'm lazy.) PS: As more and more sites use HSTS, I suspect that Firefox is going to wind up changing how they store HSTS information away from the current text file approach. Hopefully they'll provide some way for an advanced user to force-forget HSTS entries for a host. PPS: Sadly, I don't expect Firefox to ever provide the APIs that an addon would need to do this, especially for HSTS. Browsers probably really don't want to give addons any way of overriding a site's HSTS settings, and it certainly seems like a dangerous idea to me. The days when we could extend unreserved trust to browser addons are long over; the approach today is to cautiously give them only a very limited amount of power.