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by 1vuio0pswjnm7 1807 days ago
How can you be sure you actually need to send a Referer header. Whats the (user) benefit of sending one. I never send Referer and I have never had any problems as result.

I remove unwanted headers from requests generated by user agents I cannot adequately control, e.g., graphical web browsers, using a loopback-bound forward proxy. Perhaps this will be another one to remove.

1 comments

Some websites (IIRC twitter does) open link differently based on the referrer header, so automatically sending a twitter referref for all twitter links improves your experience.

There might be more critical uses

Twitter does not require a Referer header to return user-generated content ("tweets").

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27056734

Sending a Referer header does not improve [your] experience. It is the opposite for me. I cannot tolerate Twitter's Javascript, I do not use a graphical browser. I find it annoying when people submit Twitter status messages to HN.

I have a script that reformats the JSON into a simple HTML page with no Javascript. This improves the experience for me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27499784