(HTTPS) A variant of HTTP used by Netscape for handling secure transactions.

The Netscape Navigator supports a URL access method, "https", for connecting to HTTP servers using SSL.

"https" is a unique protocol that is simply SSL underneath HTTP. You need to use "https://" for HTTP URLs with SSL, whereas you continue to use "http://" for HTTP URLs without SSL. The default "https" port number is 443, as assigned by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.