Getting alternative TLDs to work with Chrome

Chrome has this very weird behavior where - when typing a full qualified domain name that is not known to Google (such as opennic.glue or grep.geek into the address bar - it redirects the user to their primary search engine (Google by default, because it's a Google product after all) instead of navigating to the actual website you just wanted to reach because the browser keeps a hardcoded, non-reconfigurable list of all ICANN TLDs. Annoying, isn't it? This is not annoying, but also a security concern, because it sends those requests directly to Google who is known to indefinitely log all search queries.

This is known to cause issues when using alternative DNS roots with custom TLDs such as OpenNIC's .glue, .bbs, .chan, etc.

Google has decided to not fix this issue in favor of performance and usability:

• Issue 104638 - CanFindIntranetURL() should look up dotted hosts based only on last component
• Issue 30636 - chrome does a search when i want to open a website on a custom TLD

There are a few possible workarounds for this issue, some are inconvenient to use while others require a few minutes of your free time:

Every time you want to visit a domain with a custom TLD, try adding a leading protocol identifier (such as http://, https://, ftp://, etc.) in front of the domain.

Example: You're trying to visit the domain opennic.glue, try http://opennic.glue instead.

Every time you want to visit a domain with a custom TLD, try adding a forward-slash (/) to the end of the domain.

Example: You're trying to visit the domain opennic.glue, try opennic.glue/ instead.

Open the Chrome settings, click Manage search engines… and add a new search engine: