IE, Chrome and Firefox, behave in pretty much the same way when
it comes to parsing URI's. If you specify
href="https://secure.site.com:443" most browsers will parse this
into the DOM as 443 part is stripped because it is redundant and
because the default port for https is already and always If you
do a view-source you get to see what was sent to the browser,
the https://secure.site.com:443 will remain unmolested, however
if you inspect the DOM this is parsed from: However if you
specify an port other than 443 combined with https, for example:
Then the port will remain intact and will stay as part of the
URL in the live DOM. You can't specify
http://secure.site.com:443, well you can but it won't work if
it's an SSL/TLS endpoint. This is for a couple of reasons. https
signals to the browser that it should engage SSL/TLS and encrypt
the request before sending to the server. Specifying https is
the only way to make that happen. It's perfectly legal to
specify http://secure.site.com:443 or any other port for that