Chrome >= 63 and virtual-hosts using .dev

Spent way too many hours trying to figure out why the virtual host (example.dev) on my development machine insisted on redirecting a http: request to https. It had been working as expected - for years!

After going crazy (defined as repeating the same setup failures and expecting different results) I finally went for help. Turns out that Google now owns the official .dev tld and requires Chrome to use SSL on any request where the domain ends with .dev.

A couple articles one here and another here.

Guess it's .test for us from now on.