(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.