[gcr]

How does this inconvenience users? It sounds like you’re saying site owners will be able to distinguish between users with a blank referer and users whose “referer” was the desktop app. Ignoring the privacy angle, isn’t that a good thing?

[jauco]

Other than the privacy angle a meta redirect is always a bit slower than a location header. You need to send an html page (more bytes) that the browser needs to render and then act on (more work).

A location header is nearly unnoticeable, a meta refresh page gives you a flash of a blank interstitial screen.

(Not that I had the same annoyance, just explaining the difference to the end user of the two approaches)

[reimar]

With the amount of bloat we have on the modern web, I think sending an HTML meta tag rather than a Location header should be the least of our concerns, when it comes to performance.

If the whole purpose of it is to have browsers send a Referer header, I don't think it's that bad. Even from a privacy perspective, you can configure browsers to not send that header anyway.