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Are there any reasons not to get rid of referers altogether?
Although tracking down fraud is usually as it relates fraudulent traffic which mostly effects advertising so I imagine a lot of the commenters here would say that is not a good reason.
> To help prevent third party data leakage while browsing privately , Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers sent to third parties starting in Firefox 59. Emphasis mine. It only does it in private mode. I experimented with the referrer options mentioned in the article with mixed success. Not sending the referer header breaks some sites and often in a non-obvious way. EDIT: referrer…
After all the referrer is useful for the site owner, not for the browser user.
Are there any reasons not to get rid of referers altogether?
In about:config, setting 'network.http.sendRefererHeader' to 0 (default is 2) will stop the referer header from being sent, and the document.referrer from being set. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.sendRefererHeader for more information.
Configurable referer behavior, including whitelist.
> To help prevent third party data leakage while browsing privately , Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers sent to third parties starting in Firefox 59. Emphasis mine. It only does it in private mode. I experimented with the referrer options mentioned in the article with mixed success. Not sending the referer header breaks some sites and often in a non-obvious way. EDIT: referrer…
Just curious, did it break any popular website?
> To help prevent third party data leakage while browsing privately , Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers sent to third parties starting in Firefox 59. Emphasis mine. It only does it in private mode. I experimented with the referrer options mentioned in the article with mixed success. Not sending the referer header breaks some sites and often in a non-obvious way. EDIT: referrer…
Yes, I think it should be in the HN title otherwise it feels like clickbait.
Wouldn't this make it obvious that the user is browsing in private mode? While I get that might be preferable to leaking information, its also not an ideal solution either.
1. What does it matter if the creators of a website are aware that a user is using private browsing to view the site? In other words, what would they do with this information?
2. As it's possible to strip out referral information using other means, assuming there's a practical use for this "private browser user" information, what could the site creators do to guard against false positives?
> To help prevent third party data leakage while browsing privately , Firefox Private Browsing Mode will remove path information from referrers sent to third parties starting in Firefox 59. Emphasis mine. It only does it in private mode. I experimented with the referrer options mentioned in the article with mixed success. Not sending the referer header breaks some sites and often in a non-obvious way. EDIT: referrer…
Just curious, did it break any popular website?
The misspelling of referrer originated in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the field into the HTTP specification. The misspelling was set in stone by the time of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945; document co-author Roy Fielding has remarked that neither "referrer" nor the misspelling "referer" were recognized by the standard Unix spell checker of the period.