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Comment by stoicjumbotron | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, I looked at the headers after clicking on your link and I found that it was sending Referrer as: https://news.ycombinator.com which is not an issue. But then I refreshed the page and saw the same Referrer again. So I checked where it was getting the Referrer from and it was not storing anything in localStorage, not in URL, nor in sessionStorage, nor in cookies. Any idea where the site was getting the Referrer from?

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Referer [sic] is determined by your browser, not the site. If you just refreshed the tab then its probably looking at the history.

Also, no browser that wants to make any claim of caring about privacy should still be sending cross-domain Referer headers by default which is yet another reason why Mozilla's privacy marketing is just that: marketing without substance.

sic is used to highlight that a spelling or grammar mistake in your writing is part of a direct quote being provided unaltered, and not your own mistake. It isn't used to provide corrections. Anyway, both spellings are fine in various regions.

Got it. So it gets the Referer from the browser history?

Your browser remembers and replays it. localStorage/sessionStorage/cookies aren't available to parse by the time request headers are sent.

You'll notice this behavior goes away if you select the URL bar and hit enter (as if you were navigating to the site manually).

Yeah you're right. Selecting the URL and hitting enter did clear the Referer. One comment says the browser identifies the Referer by looking at the history is that so?

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