I know this is an old question, but I bumped into this issue today while tinkering, and the problem ultimately was the guy in the chair, not the code on the screen.

After trying all the suggestions, I found that this:

https://google.com

did not work, while this:

https://www.google.com

did. It's a silly error on my part, but then again with how smart modern browsers can be, I can't remember the last time I had to actually type the www portion of a URL.