Heh... I remember having an internal dns server with zone files for a whole bunch of internal servers using $our-real-domain-name.local as dupes of $our-real-domain-name.com. Then an early OSX upgrade brought in Rendezvous/Bonjour in maybe '02 or '03 - and all the Macs stopped being able to find the local machines... (And the sysadmin who'd set it all up didn't believe the problem reports at first, 'cause her CentOS machine were still working just fine.)
Great explanation. But I use Safari for development so probably no need to change for the time being. :)
Hmm, I stand corrected. Just upgraded to the latest macOS High Sierra, and it appears that Safari is automatically redirecting http to https for .dev. I changed a local dev domain in my hosts file to .dew and it started working via http again.