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Suppose I have a webpage located at http://www.website.com with an <iframe> in it. Like this:
<html> <head>...</head> <body> ... <iframe src="http://www.washington.edu"> ... </body> </html> Now suppose someone goes to www.website.com and clicks a link in the iframe itself (this link is located on www.washington.edu website).
My question is what is the HTTP Referer in this case?
Is it http://www.website.com (the page hosting iframe) or is it http://www.washington.edu (the page in which the link was clicked)?
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Referrer. When loading an iframe, the browser sends it important information about who is loading it in the Referer header (notice the single r , a typo we must live with). The referrerpolicy attribute lets us set the referrer to send to the iframe when loading it.
Definition and Usage. The <iframe> tag specifies an inline frame. An inline frame is used to embed another document within the current HTML document.
An inline frame (iframe) is a HTML element that loads another HTML page within the document. It essentially puts another webpage within the parent page. They are commonly used for advertisements, embedded videos, web analytics and interactive content.
There might be several reasons why the referer URL would be blank. It will/may be empty when the enduser: entered the site URL in browser address bar itself. visited the site by a browser-maintained bookmark.
It depends on the browser.
Firefox and Safari will report the referrer as http://www.website.com while some versions of Internet Explorer will show http://www.washington.edu as the referrer.
UPDATE 2015-04: Testing latest versions of above mentioned, all of them would return http://www.washington.edu
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As of August 2015 all the major browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) should set the Referer HTTP header to http://www.washington.edu in this case.
But I encourage you to test how specific browsers versions behave in specific cases if your application depends on Referer value heavily.
I write this because for example I have found out that Safari 8 currently makes requests with incorrect Referer for JavaScript loaded in iframes, probably if this JavaScript have previously been requested with a different Referer. This is a bug that's similar to this particular one that was closed in Chromium only in 2014. (I have already reported it to Apple, btw.)
Historically Internet Explorer 6 showed different behaviour than described above - it would set the Referer HTTP header to http://www.website.com.
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