Firefox 87 trims HTTP Referrers by default to protect user privacy

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/03/22/firefox-87-trims-http-referrers-by-default-to-protect-user-privacy/

by twapi • 5 years ago

972 251 5 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

tomaszs3• 5 years ago

I don't understand what Mozilla does to Firefox anymore. What does it mean a page "can" leak private data?

Is there any story about anyone affected by the issue? Does this issue even exist?

It is just breaking another piece of the open web.

It just seems like Mozilla not only surrendered in gaining browser market but also actively acts against open web.

I thought website creators and website users should be in charge of what they want to do. But it seems no. Now Mozilla decides what web standards can be broken.

I'd maybe applaud changes by Mozilla, but with all of these efforts it is not aimed in gaining more users. Firefox does not gain users with such actions. It does not make any sense what is the aim of Mozilla anymore with Firefox.

Ayesh• 5 years ago

Is there any story about anyone affected by the issue? Does this issue even exist

Yes. Yes it does.

Imagine, a web site that has a query parameter with a secret (password reset pages, email unsubscribe, custom feeds, etc). Any images or other assets used in the page will receive the full URL as the referrer, so they can see those secrets.

GitHub fixed this very issue a few years ago. They have a feature to get custom RSS feeds for user activity. There is a secret worry parameter in the URL, and any third party images were receiving that full URL.

Referrer-Policy header is already supported in many browsers.

fvv• 5 years ago

If it's a page that contain or receive secret should be using https where referrer is already stripped off

tomaszs3• 5 years ago

So where is a real life example?

iso1631• 5 years ago

RFC-1945: Because the source of a link may be private information or may reveal an otherwise private information source, it is strongly recommended that the user be able to select whether or not the Referer field is sent. For example, a browser client could have a toggle switch for browsing openly/anonymously, which would respectively enable/disable the sending of Referer and From information.

So not sending referrer has always been fine, and I suspect that firefox will have an option to enable the sending somewhere in it.

pjmlp• 5 years ago

Normal people are going to switch browser instead of trying to find the said option, because Firefox is "broken".

darkwater• 5 years ago

According to Wikipedia [1] the "Referer" (sic) HTTP header is an optional one so I don't see how they are breaking the open web by sending less data in it under some circumstances.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

selykg2• 5 years ago

If the referrer header contains the full URL from which the user came from it could contain something the user deems private.

Imagine that the URL contains a search string that contains something the user might deem private, or the article is about something a state may deem to be illegal, etc.

This may not be PII but it could be deemed private by the user. The user should be in control of what information could be given to a website. Imagine a scenario where a person is a member of a group that is looking for equal rights in a country that is very much opposed to this. The group uses a tool that happens to make it clear who this group is. The group then links to an article about their cause or similar. Now that country could potentially link things together and demand information about everyone in that group.

It's amazing how little bits of information about you can get you in hot water.

This is a good move imo, and I'm glad that Mozilla is trying to plug these types of things. It's better for everyone.

As an aside, moving to a privacy oriented browser could very well get Firefox more users. Just like Apple's play to being a private and secure mobile OS is getting them users.

tomaszs3• 5 years ago

So where is the example?

ing33k• 5 years ago

any chance that a few CORS implementations will break due to this ?

capableweb• 5 years ago

No.... ? Not as far as I could gather. Why would CORS break because of this change? AFAIK, CORS has nothing with the referrer header.

gruez2• 5 years ago

he's probably talking about referrer checks which are used as a mitigation against csrf

gruez2• 5 years ago

It only trims path and query information so it should be fine unless the site is overzealous and checks those.

qertoip• 5 years ago

Good.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

And just a reminder that it's always a good idea to set Referrer-Policy regardless on sites you own.

arbuge2• 5 years ago

It's good advice, but bizarrely some browsers ignore Referrer-Policy, even when it requests "no-referrer", which basically increases the privacy level to the maximum possible - beyond for example the origin-only settings which the browser defaults are now tending towards (such as with this Firefox update).

In my testing, all recent versions of Safari on iOS were the worst offenders here. I talked more about this here: https://twitter.com/arbuge/status/1354805900268105743

You would think that Safari would jump at the chance to show no referrer, given Apple's attempts to position themselves as champions of user privacy, but for some reason the opposite is in fact true.

jwilk• 5 years ago

What does ITP stand for?

edent• 5 years ago

Here's a practical reason for doing this.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/01/mailchimp-leaks-your-email-...

A few years ago, I discovered that referrers from MailChimp let you unsubscribe people from lists, and see their email addresses.

maddyboo• 5 years ago

Very cool discovery. This is an excellent example of why putting sensitive data inside URLs can be problematic and should be done with great caution.

It should be added that the eventual elimination of referers won’t make URLs safe. There are countless other ways they can leak.

avsteele• 5 years ago

Doesn't this just push people to more tracking cookies? How are sites supposed to know what sources are driving their traffic? Whether visitors are coming via email campaigns, google, etc?

Symbiote• 5 years ago

Why should they know this? I am keen that they don't know this.

If I walk into a shop, the shopkeeper doesn't know if something in the window caught my eye, if my friend recommended the helpful staff, if I saw the advert they placed on a billboard, or if I just came in because it's raining.

slater• 5 years ago

"the shopkeeper doesn't know if something in the window caught my eye"

Except that's already here, or in the making, i.e. with those advertising eye-tracking stories that make the rounds every 6 months or so.

nickjj• 5 years ago

If I walk into a shop, the shopkeeper doesn't know if something in the window caught my eye, if my friend recommended the helpful staff, if I saw the advert they placed on a billboard, or if I just came in because it's raining.

A lot of places will attach unique discount codes to advertisements to get an idea on where you came from.

For example, on a TV commercial it might say use promo code COOL123 to save 10% or if you saw that billboard it might say to use NICE123 instead. Then there's radio, newspapers and so on each with their own unique code that offer the same 10% discount.

And since a discount is applied chances are you'll use it because not too many folks would purposely avoid the discount to hide where you discovered the shopkeeper from.

You often see this being done online too, but there's also things like UTM tags or unique URLs that let you do the same thing without discount codes. It's not to make more money as a shopkeeper (avoiding the discount), it's just easier to set up. Using a UTM tag is a matter of creating a link with a few query parameters. Creating a specific discount code or a unique URL for a specific promotion takes a bit of extra leg work.

I'm not sure where I stand on the movement to remove all forms of referral tracking. Both referral headers and UTM tags can be spoofed or removed through extensions so using them as any type of source of truth was a bad idea anyways.

However, as someone who sells digital products I like knowing which specific video or blog post helped someone discover some of my paid content. But at the same time, the end game is really "is the needle moving forward?" so the specifics kind of don't matter. But in the short term while you're figuring things out, the extra info does help you focus on where to spend your time. Not just for more profit, but to provide better and more free content because it's what folks want.

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

But the shopkeeper knows if you came in through the street entrance (maybe saw the window display), through the mall entrance (maybe saw the sandwich board), or through the communicating door to the next shop (maybe saw the merchandise).

pbhjpbhj3• 5 years ago

We run a micro-business and we ask people how they heard of us (and use offer codes, but that was mentioned).

People are usually happy to tell us; but then we only use that information to run our business better, we don't sell it.

Another technique is referral bonus, "recommend a friend" type offers.

Deukhoofd• 5 years ago

You can still see what site the referrer came from, just not the path + query string behind it.

puszczyk2• 5 years ago

How does this work in real life? How does say Tesco can find out if I’m shopping there because of a billboard ad, or because it’s conveniently located on my commute? How do they measure their ad campaign effectiveness?

TeMPOraL• 5 years ago

Facial recognition in stores, your credit card, or your loyalty card tie your purchase to an ID, which then can be back-tied to all the Internet surveillance in your browser and on your phone, to attribute purchases to ads viewed on-line. It's a bit tougher with attributing real-life billboard ads.

ldjb• 5 years ago

Firefox still sends the origin (the domain name and subdomain) of the referring page, so you can still see the website the user is coming from.

Google has had a dereferral process in place for many years anyway, which prevents you from seeing the specific search engine results page the user is coming from. So this really doesn't change anything for those websites such as Google that already had these security features in place.

Andrew_nenakhov• 5 years ago

Google has had a dereferral process in place for many years anyway, which prevents you from seeing the specific search engine results page the user is coming from.

Is this really a security feature though? Or is it Google keeping the important information for themselves?

contravariant• 5 years ago

A popular approach seems to be to use customized URLs. Which is of course always an option, though ClearURLs takes care of a few common options.

Besides it's up to a user whether they want to tell you where they came from, you aren't supposed to know anything, you are allowed to.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

Back in the days, there'd be a jsessionid in the url :-)

andrewaylett• 5 years ago

Thanks for the pointer -- not come across Clear URLs before.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/clearurls/ in case anyone else has also not seen it.

nkrisc• 5 years ago

As a visitor to your web site: not my problem and you've no right to know anyway what I visited before coming to your site. That fact that you can still see the referring domain is still too much, in my opinion.

gxnxcxcx• 5 years ago

In Firefox, "network.http.referer.spoofSource = true" takes care of that last bit. The only thing it breaks for me is codepen.io, which fortunately I don't use.

viraptor• 5 years ago

UTM tags mostly https://www.intownwebdesign.com/google/google-analytics-utm-...

gspr• 5 years ago

How are sites supposed to know what sources are driving their traffic? Whether visitors are coming via email campaigns, google, etc?

Kindly, and non-intrusively, ask them? You know, just like in other aspects of life?

kevincox3• 5 years ago

I think the major problem here is that this information was sent *by default* and many websites didn't realize that outbound links where sharing the source URL. This could result in an exploitable security issue.

Now the website has to do something explicit to share information (beyond the hostname) to outbound cross-origin outbound links. It is much more likely that the website will pay attention to what information they are sharing in this case.

sneak3• 5 years ago

I hope they do User-Agent next.

jefftk4• 5 years ago

They've indicated they may: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/202#is...

Commenting in support of Chrome's proposal to freeze the user agent and provide UACH instead.

sneak3• 5 years ago

UACH is worse than a header.

The server shouldn't get information about the client.

Unsurprisingly, UACH is spearheaded by an ad tracking company that benefits from a moat caused by minimally viable/workable browsers costing millions of dollars and dozens of developers to implement.

oneeyedpigeon• 5 years ago

At least that might stop Twitter refusing to serve User-Agents it doesn't recognise.

sneak3• 5 years ago

How long until we see a CFAA prosecution based solely on providing a UA in the request that you're not "supposed" to use?

floatboth2• 5 years ago

There was a brief period of time last year when Twitch streams broke for me, turns out because my UA includes "FreeBSD" instead of an OS they know about. Eventually this was fixed.

omoikane• 5 years ago

Coincidentally, Mozilla's site is one that consistently blocks my user-agent (Lynx).

deepstack• 5 years ago

Good for firefox. although I can see how this may break vimeo kind of service that only allow embedding video from certain web site.

simias4• 5 years ago

They still send the domain name on cross-origin requests, so the type of filtering Vimeo does will be unaffected as far as I can tell.

It's only when the target website needs the full source URL (with path and GET parameters) that you may encounter issues.

hannob• 5 years ago

Just a FYI because some people are complaining that Mozilla is doing something evil or will break all of the web or something. Chrome made the same change a while back:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/07/referrer-p...

So if this breaks something people probably already noticed. And Mozilla is merely aligning with the browser with the largest market share on this. (Also everyone who wants something different for their sites, it's configurable: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... )

merb4• 5 years ago

why tf should removing Referer break sites? who uses Referer?! the only thing that Referer brought were privacy leaks.

npteljes• 5 years ago

I recently had to enable it for some login to work, unfortunately can't remember which website.

prussian• 5 years ago

I turned it off once and the most common breakages were usually authentication that involves some kind of OpenID delegation.

simias4• 5 years ago

Some websites would whitelist referrers to prevent hotlinking resources from other websites (incurring potentially high bandwidth costs).

But overall I'm all for getting rid of it. It's a remnant of the early web that doesn't make a lot of sense these days, and creates more problems than it solves.

EDIT: Although I just realized that strict-origin-when-cross-origin (the new policy) would still let the hotlinking detection use case work, since you typically only need domain information for that. I initially thought that they would use same-origin or something like that. It'll teach me to comment before I read the linked story.

mauvehaus2• 5 years ago

I believe jwz rather famously does. Let's see:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/03/cursed-keyboard-image/

smcl2• 5 years ago

jwz has got a rather ... interesting use case for it relating to HN

eli• 5 years ago

It was a somewhat common “security” feature to check referer, especially in the days before you could rely on CSP.

hk1337• 5 years ago

The first thing I thought of was when you go to a URL but it requires a login so it redirects you to the login page but then redirects you back to your original page after you login. Pretty sure it’s easily remedied without referer but that was the first thing I thought about.

jakub_g2• 5 years ago

Some ad networks use(d to use) referers for brand safety when resource serving an ad is embedded iframe. For example if the parent URL contains "osama-bin-laden-killed", don't display ad about nice family moments together (or anything else, likely)

Isthatablackgsd2• 5 years ago

Some sites use referrer as their "cookie session". One site use Cloudflare Anti-DDOS referrer as their cookie. Removing that referrer will cause the browser to infinity loop in CF Anti-DDOS because the site is expecting that referrer before entering the site.

I hate sharing Amazon shopping links because Amazon packs much referrer as possible in the link. Amazon uses the referrer to track who am I sharing to and use it for data for them to sells.

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

who uses Referer?!

How can you tell it's Monday morning on HN?

Someone starts pontificating, "I don't use this, so there is no conceivable reason that anyone else on the planet should ever need this ever!"

See also: Half of StackOverflow questions.

smt882• 5 years ago

Referer is an important way to maintain the security of an OAuth flow.

I don't know how commonly it would break that flow, but it certainly could depending on implementation details that are not narrowly prescribed by the OAuth2 spec.

asveikau• 5 years ago

Isn't it also sort of useful information for site owners even if they are not maliciously slurping your private information?

For example you might not know that important site X linked to you and is driving Y% of your audience. You are not necessarily interested in the individuals following the links when you discover that.

lgeorget• 5 years ago

We use them to prevent other websites to hotlink our dynamic map tiles. Not a big protection of course but useful anyway.

amaccuish• 5 years ago

Loads of cashback systems use it. You get directed to Lieferando or whatever and the "click" is registered using the referrer.

jrochkind1• 5 years ago

I didn't realize this, thanks for pointing it out.

I thought, wait, but how is this feature in my own app still working with chrome then! Aha, Chrome only trims referrer for cross-origin requests.

Is FF the same?

Looks like... yes! "…will also trim path and query information for all cross-origin requests."

superkuh2• 5 years ago

This doesn't change my opinion. This is like saying, "The soviet union gulags their people too and did it first. It's fine."

Whataboutism re: corporate control of web standards.

ethbr0• 5 years ago

Good for both Firefox and Chrome.

Does this mean Gmail can stop rewriting links in emails (ostensibly to derefer)?

lupire2• 5 years ago

Presumably no because they also probably use it for analytics and/or security (blocking malware URLs)

kevincox3• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure they could have done this years ago as most browsers supported setting the policy explicitly for years. This only changes the default policy.

The only reason I can see Google still doing rewriting is to protect very old browsers and laziness.

Larrikin2• 5 years ago

Are there any extensions that can rewrite these in the meantime?

greggman3• 5 years ago

does gmail rewrite links? AFAIK it's not rewriting any of the links in my emails. Maybe I have some setting or environment where it doesn't

ehsankia3• 5 years ago

Your FYI is also useful for the contrapositive of that feeling, which we often see on HN: "Look how Firefox is leading privacy improvements and how much more privacy forward it is than Chrome".

michaelt• 5 years ago

You see, when Firefox improves privacy it's for the good of users, but when Chrome improves privacy it's because Google can track you just fine despite the change and they want to give competing ad networks a kicking.

/s ?

m463• 5 years ago

But doesn't chrome have baked-in identification?

(not that firefox doesn't have lots of phone-home behavior you can't turn off like firefox.settings.services.mozilla.com)

lucideer6• 5 years ago

True, but this case contains a little more complexity. Namely:

1. Chrome, as the dominant browser, drives developer behaviour (devs need to change their websites when Chrome breaks compat). Firefox doesn't have this luxury, so some features like this must necessarily be lead by Chrome in the monopolistic browser world we live in.

2. Referers allow websites to individually track users better, which is bad for user privacy if you are concerned about entities such as Facebook, etc. tracking you. However, those entities are Google's competitors; for Google, Chrome does the tracking, so they have no need of the Referer.

Removing it is "good" for user privacy w.r.t. Google's competitors, and simultaneously good for Google (disadvantaging such competitors).

IAmNotAFix• 5 years ago

Google consistenly tries to make it harder for their competitors to grab user data.

jonas21• 5 years ago

It's also useful for recognizing how preconceived notions and biases influence upvoting behavior and by extension what gains visibility on the front page, further reinforcing those biases.

At the time I'm writing this, there are 740 upvotes and 187 comments on this story vs. 12 upvotes and 0 comments for the top submission when Chrome made the same change [1]. Without the FYI, I would have assumed this was Firefox leading the way in privacy because I was simply unaware that Chrome had done it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24008516

smileybarry• 5 years ago

Ah, that explains why the old "come from Google" trick for bypassing paywalls stopped working a while ago.

Ajedi32• 5 years ago

Yeah, I was gonna say; isn't this part of the spec? Seems like it is; at least in the latest editor's draft: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-referrer-policy/#default-ref...

unnouinceput• 5 years ago

That's probably because if you run Chrome, you're already Google's executable on your system. I mean they can track you using gazillion of other, more precise meanings and this is something they shut it to keep the pie for themselves. I do not use Chrome anymore, switched to Firefox a year and a half ago - best decision ever.

xPaw• 5 years ago

That doesn't appear to be accurate in Chrome, in 89 I am getting no-referrer-when-downgrade.

For example, I clicked a link on old reddit and saw the full referer being sent to another origin.

canada_dry• 5 years ago

And to note the obvious... the companies that you might think would be most opposed to it (e.g. facebook, google) really don't care because their page tracking hooks are omnipresent so they're not missing out on any precious meta data.

professor_v• 5 years ago

I just realized the 'Referer' header is actually a misspelling in the http protocol.

themoose8• 5 years ago

Yup, here's an article you may enjoy https://httptoolkit.tech/blog/http-wtf/ and related HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343577

SilasX3• 5 years ago

And I made up the HTTP status code "397 Tolerating" so that if you spell it "Referrer", browsers can correct you while still giving you the response you wanted :-p (see section 3 example):

https://pastebin.com/TPj9RwuZ

sjwright• 5 years ago

I am genuinely unsure whether your RFC was intended to be serious or not.

SilasX3• 5 years ago

Late correction: sorry, that should be "if your browser spells it 'Referrer', webservers can correct you...".

tannhaeuser2• 5 years ago

That's going to break lots of older sites using Referrer for navi state. These will now either have to use query params, cookies, or JS instead. Not to mention easy affiliation links.

gianfrid• 5 years ago

Nice, I'm using SmartReferer (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/smart-referer...), I'm always happy to drop an extension when Mozilla natively implements the same feature

ChrisGranger• 5 years ago

Smart Referer is even stricter than this new policy if you don't use the recommended 'Lax' setting. It will block referers even on the same domain but to different subdomains, if you want it to.

surajs• 5 years ago

your privacy will become the joke

e12e• 5 years ago

I think there'd be a bit less panic in the comments if the title/headline reflected that the change (as I understand it) applies cross-origin and cross-scheme (http > tls). So if you're preventing hot-linking of assets, this should not affect you (or; you have some control over it via policy):

this new stricter referrer policy will not only trim information for requests going from HTTPS to HTTP, but will also trim path and query information for all cross-origin requests.

Seems like a fairly balanced way to protect privacy along with preserving utility?

myfonj2• 5 years ago

Oh, I'll really miss occasionally peeking at AWStats and discovering weird pages pointing at my weird pages :(

This subtle aspect of web had been always strangely appealing for me: people leaving trails in access logs and building real "footpaths" network of synapses between HTML documents, across origins. Sad to watch it dying, however beneficial and understandable it is.

I feel it didn't have to be this way: maybe if GET wasn't so widely misused recently and generally everybody knew what to not put in URL and acted accordingly, we could have preserved such nice things.

leephillips• 5 years ago

Totally agree. As almost no one uses anything like webmentions, this was the way to discover who was linking to your site. (And because the Google link tool didn’t seem to return much actual information.)

nerdponx• 5 years ago

Bring it back! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26401955

myfonj2• 5 years ago

From a glance at MDN [1] and specs [3] it seems at least we can still opt-in our sites to suggest visitors user agent to pass full referrer address along outgoing links; there seems to be three ways to do so:

    # 1. Apache conf
    Header set Referrer-Policy "no-referrer-when-downgrade"
    <!-- 2. meta HTML head with same effect [2] -->
    <meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">
    <!-- 3.  HTML anchor attribute -->
    <a href="https://…" referrerpolicy="no-referrer-when-downgrade">

This will pass full path and query when navigating between HTTPS to foreign origin. I guess it will be lost in http: to https: redirects. `unsafe-url` value would do it even for HTTP.

(Funny all three have different spelling, and that in effect they direct value of a single HTTP header with inherently erroneous spelling.)

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... [2] my guess using `<meta http-equiv="Referrer-Policy" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">` should do the same, but is not explicitly mentioned anywhere. [3] https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-referrer-policy/

ehsankia3• 5 years ago

Absolutely, I loved seeing spikes in my traffic and going to the reddit/HN thread that caused it. I guess you still can manually figure it out using a search engine maybe, but like you said the smaller weird ones will go under the cover probably.

kevincox3• 5 years ago

Exactly. I am torn on this feature. On one hand this is the correct default for privacy, there are a number of websites with somewhat sensitive information in the URL. But relying on a search engine or webmaster tools to crawl the entire web to see where your traffic is coming from is a real shame. Especially because it will have an inevitable delay.

stevenicr2• 5 years ago

Similar here, and as I have written recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532433

I feel that this could easily be a user toggle-able option near the url bar - and that people could choose to send referrer and search parameters to sites they like - and I could understand certain medical terms and what-not maybe people wanting to keep more hidden.

I'm all for the browser taking control of this and giving the users options - love to be able to have the web site detect this and add a box saying 'hey would you mind sharing referral and or search term with us"

It really helps when trying to figure out if you should be adding more content for 'term-mainly-X-demo' might be searching or for sure should be adding more content for other terms people are definitely searching for.

I would imagine that many people would like to hide referrer for fbook, most of my sites I would think people would be willing to help with providing such info.

as far as webmastering and stats to try to help visitors - it appears google is keeping more and more data to themselves, and now firefox is making it less transparent too.

I see there is a link to the referrer policy for your site, but nothing about begging the user to include the info when visiting - oh well.

awstats and similar have helped troubleshoot and helped expand many sites for many years and now another nudge to install third party slow-ware google-stats.. I just, sigh.

behnamoh4• 5 years ago

I feel that this could easily be a user toggle-able option near the url bar...

No ordinary user wants to deal with that much complexity.

stjohnswarts2• 5 years ago

It's not really important enough to be a visible element on the bar. It would be a good compromise to bury an opt-in somewhere in settings though. Firefox is doing the right thing here by making it default and uncomplicated.

TheRealPomax• 5 years ago

Why? What happened here is a change to the default value when https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re... value if it's left unspecified. Set it to what you want, and this change doesn't affect you?

zerocrates• 5 years ago

It's the policies of the external sites that matter to the parent poster, not their own.

forgotmypw17• 5 years ago

Yeah, the big sites will still get to see the data though, so if you just become an employee, you can probably still get it.

TriNetra2• 5 years ago

yes, for content-only sites it makes perfect sense. For sites hosting private data requiring login, (especially if there's some sensitive information in the URL) it poses a risk.

simias4• 5 years ago

You'll still get the source domain name, you just won't be able to see the full path. Of course how useful it is will depend on the source website, if it's "news.ycombinator.com" it won't be too difficult to find the post, if it's "facebook.com" it'll be a tad more complicated.

esaym• 5 years ago

Yes, I came to lament AWStats as well. I remember when google started stripping search terms in their referring urls. So then you didn't know what search terms were pointing to your site.

Google's answer was to just get your site verified and use their search console tools. Annoying, but OK. But then other search engines followed suit which left awstats with a lot of missing data. Now with simplified referring urls... it will mostly be a fancy page counter :/

cirno• 5 years ago

I suspect this is going to be a huge boon for services like ahrefs that crawls the web and provides information on which URLs on the internet link to which other URLs.

ape4• 5 years ago

I've noticed recently the <Back button is sometimes disabled in Firefox. Related?

chrisjc• 5 years ago

Not sure if it's related, but the

Back button is sometimes disabled in Firefox

for me when I click on a Medium (or similar) link. However I think this is related to containers. It's really annoying, but I'd rather just avoid Medium that abandon Firefox.

nofinator• 5 years ago

This made me wonder how to do it now, in Firefox 86. I found this helpful page: https://askubuntu.com/questions/797135/how-to-disable-http-r...

TL;DR about:config --> Network.http.sendRefererHeader --> change value from 2 to 0

jefftk4• 5 years ago

That fully removes the header, instead of stripping it down to just the origin as they're going to be doing.

floatboth2• 5 years ago

network.http.referer.defaultPolicy is the correct one

mmphosis• 5 years ago

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer

jakub_g2• 5 years ago

As a user I love stricter privacy. As a developer working for a platform company whose content (video) is embedded by thousands of websites, I hate this particular change:

- more difficult to analyze weird / fraudulent embedders

- more difficult to debug issues ("what's the sample URL to repro? no sample URL in logs, only top-level of the domain, but I don't find our embed anywhere ¯\_(ツ)_/¯")

Funny thing: you can't just tell your embedding partners to change the embed code and use `referrerpolicy=...` on the iframe, to expose the full URL, because it's not GDPR-compliant apparently. So you need user's consent first. But how do you obtain user's consent before you render HTML on the server? :) ("GDPR wall" is not compliant either)

Life sucks, I guess. But it's for greater good, and I guess the companies will somehow survive.

codegeek• 5 years ago

So if someone does want to use http referrer for any reason (e.g. only load a certain asset if coming from internal URL/specific referrer), what needs to be done ?

jefftk4• 5 years ago

Checking for a specific internal URL will still work: they're changing the default cross-origin behavior.

dbg314152• 5 years ago

Does Firefox 87 still make my MBP a toaster when I turn on a Zoom call through Firefox?

Power usage for same streaming video call on Safari vs. Firefox.

https://i.imgur.com/I7T19d0.png

hu32• 5 years ago

Does that still apply for M1?

dbg314152• 5 years ago

No, Intel-based.

bouncycastle• 5 years ago

The HTTP referer (a misspelling of referrer) was broken for a while, ever since spammers figured out they can abuse it.

Mauricebranagh• 5 years ago

Isn't this going to break campaign tracking for Adwords etc.

Not exactly what the actual risk is to privacy here does seem there is a lot of bandwagon jumping going on - a bit like "Elf & Safety" or the Data protection act is trotted out when an organisation wants an excuse not to do something.

ratww• 5 years ago

Referrers can leak information about which pages the user was navigating before, which linked websites have no business of knowing.

If you want to do tracking and have control over both pages, just use a different URL, a query string, or something like that.

collsni• 5 years ago

I have sending the referrer header for years in firefox, if a site doesn't accept it I just go somewhere else.

TriNetra2• 5 years ago

We chose not to add referrer to ASPSecurityKit main site [0]. It's a static content site and I think it'd be useful to let other sites know which page (docs/guides/blog) on our site got them a visitor because the content is public anyway. We've applied it on the dashboard though, this same origin-when-cross-origin policy.

0: https://ASPSecurityKit.net

aimor• 5 years ago

I'm surprised it took this long, and it's still not completely gone. I've never understood the history of why http referer exists (original intent) or why the user would benefit from sharing it.

jameshart• 5 years ago

The original HTTP specification really didn’t think of the web as an adversarial environment. The RFC that specified the ‘referer’ header [1] described it as having the following purpose:

    [Referer]... allows the client to specify, for
    the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which
    the Request-URI was obtained. This allows a server to generate lists
    of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching,
    etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for
    maintenance.

The idea of how a user benefits from sharing it was that it would help the webmasters upon whom they were reliant to do a better job of curating their websites. It clearly expects a benevolent relationship between the owner of the linked site, the host of the link, and the user. Idealistic, sure, but understandable in a collaborative, academic context.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945#section-10.13

beagle32• 5 years ago

That reminds me that in 1999, looking through the referrer logs, I realized that if the link came in from an Outlook email, Outlook+IE would report the subject of the referring email as the referrer (iirc with user name, something like “mailbox://user@site/subject-of-the-email”).

So we started looking for those more seriously in my company, and got quite a bit of interesting Intel from potential investors, competitors we knew about, and some we weren’t even aware of.

It was just the subject and user, but was often surprisingly informative.

pbhjpbhj3• 5 years ago

Do you, or anyone, have [links to] more information about exactly what Outlook does when requesting a tracking pixel to display in an email.

I can't sniff it (Wireshark) as I don't have that sort of access to a network with Outlook on. I've googled but didn't find anything useful.

beagle32• 5 years ago

It was surely fixed in Outlook 2007, perhaps even 2003 and maybe even 2000.

AdmiralAsshat• 5 years ago

Will Firefox trim their own header additions when searching?

e.g. here's the page that Firefox generates when I try to search "Dragon Quest XI" in a Private Window on Amazon via the address bar:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dragon+quest+xi&link_code=qs&sour...

Note the 'mozilla-20' tag at the end.

inigoesdr• 5 years ago

That's not the same as the referrer header; it's mostly invisible to the end user without inspecting the raw request data.

SquareWheel3• 5 years ago

That's an affiliate link. It seems then Mozilla is injecting affiliate codes on Amazon searches.

kaba0• 5 years ago

What does the browser has to do with how amazon implements their search? Amazon probably parses the User Agent and puts mozilla there for some reason.

Black101• 5 years ago

It's about time...

eitland• 5 years ago

For anyone who wonders how http referer could ever be a good idea consider the following:

I remember when my dad studied to become a teacher. As one of their assignments they had to create a webside. As someone who had recently given up farming I think he wrote about farm animals and linked to some other pages about small scale poultry and similar topics.

One day he got a mail from the "webmaster" of one of the sites he linked to that he would have to update his links soon. I remember being really surprised that someone knew my dad had linked to them.

Being only 16 or 17 or something I only knew simple html, basic and vb but I knew that html links were one way.

I don't think I realized until later what had really happened: this person had looked at their server logs to see where their customers came from, looked up the page and found the email address.

Of course this also highlights why the referer is so problematic.

jacques_chester• 5 years ago

One day he got a mail from the "webmaster" of one of the sites he linked to that he would have to update his links soon. I remember being really surprised that someone knew my dad had linked to them.

These days 100% of such emails I receive are from spammers trying to steal some google juice.

antonvs5• 5 years ago

You'll still be able to see which site visitors came from, just not the specific page.

idclip• 5 years ago

Wish i was able enough to help Web servers cull http and be https per default rather than offer complex alternatives that are often hard and multi step to implement.

NelsonMinar• 5 years ago

And so the dream of bidirectional hyperlinks finally dies. Turns out not only do we not need them, in most cases you really don't want them.

superkuh2• 5 years ago

Yes. This makes surfing the web harder and will result in more centralization within proprietary walled gardens instead of federation via protocol mechanisms.

Scoundreller• 5 years ago

Google largely killed this when they moved to https by default, but I missed reviewing what search terms visitors used to visit my site and then creating content to answer their actual questions, instead of guessing.

But the web was a much smaller place/time back then.

Oh, and seeing people search for my uncommon name...

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 years ago

I never send a referer header. This has zero effect on my "user experience".

wronex• 5 years ago

Same experience here.

But why don't thet kill the referer header entirely? Mozilla's attempts at protecting user privacy seem very half-hearted.

nybble41• 5 years ago

But why don't thet kill the referer header entirely?

Compatibility, probably. There are some sites which fail to load or end up in redirect loops if the Referer header is missing. It's not just minor sites, either. The last time I tried blocking Referer headers—just the third-party ones—it broke Google Hangouts (both the Chrome extension and the web version). That was earlier this year.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 5 years ago

"Mozilla's attempts at protecting user privacy seem very half-hearted."

That is because they are. Mozilla cannot survive without internet advertising, and they sacrifice the privacy of Firefox users in exchange for funding from an advertising company, Google.

Anyone who is serious about internet privacy knows it requires some amount of vigilance. It necessitates some amount of inconvenience. It is not simply a matter of software selection. AFAIK, no third party today is going to take on full responisibility for any user's privacy. You never see Mozilla advocating for user vigilance, yet the fight for internet privacy is the user's, not Mozilla's. The message from Mozilla is something like "If you use Firefox, we have you covered." This encourages inaction more than action. That's good for companies like Google.

If Google paid a group of users the millions it pays the group working at Mozilla, I doubt those users would care one iota about "privacy". Their own, or anybody else's. Why bite the hand that feeds you.

I only send Host and Connection headers for GET and Host, Connection, Content-Length and Content-Type for POST. For me, this works beautifully for 100% of websites posted to HN, and elsewhere on the www. I can easily create exceptions in the forward proxy configs to send Referer to sites that require it. This never happens, IME.

wheybags• 5 years ago

Would it really break that much to just get rid of referrer altogether? I would miss it on my personal site (self hosted, Foss analytics, no google analytics there), but it wouldn't actually break anything.

burtonator• 5 years ago

This is going to suck... now 2% of my users won't have HTTPS referrers.

Firefox 87 trims HTTP Referrers by default to protect user privacy

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