Why no referer / referrer header for some of my AJAX requests?

Asked Jun 01 '15 at 11:10

Active Jun 01 '15 at 11:10

Viewed 4,994 times

I have a webapp that renders a shopping bag item-count through an AJAX request. JQuery is used to make the request and render the bag appropriately.

A small but significant number of the requests that we are seeing on the server have no referer header set, although they seem to be coming from legitimate browser requests. The user-agent strings include Chrome, Safari and Firefox on Windows and Mac. Looking at the sessions it seems that whole sessions rather than requests are not sending the header.

Are there any circumstances under which this is expected behaviour?

asked Jun 01 '15 at 11:10

Duncan McGregor

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The users are using some kind of safe mode on their browsers (probably with an extension), which hides the referrer. – FrancoisBaveye Jun 01 '15 at 11:14
Any evidence that such a thing exists? Given the number of sites that check the referer for AJAX requests wouldn't they find that a good part of the internet doesn't work? – Duncan McGregor Jun 01 '15 at 11:23
Related http://stackoverflow.com/q/6880659/97777 – Duncan McGregor Jun 05 '15 at 16:15

Why no referer / referrer header for some of my AJAX requests?

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