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This technique (redirecting through some dummy ?url=... page) is a common way of doing an external redirect on any service you're building. It's a simple way of
by k_bx 8y ago
This technique (redirecting through some dummy ?url=... page) is a common way of doing an external redirect on any service you're building. It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website, which is more secure to your data and the service you're building (e.g. Gmail).
- z3t4 8y agoBut browsers seem to have stopped giving out referrer some years back.
- ajnin 8y agoThere's a standard way to do that, which is to add a rel="noreferrer" tag to your outgoing links.
- k_bx 8y agoCode usually doesn't carry final HTML in its data structures, whereas converting a URL in a single place where it's extracted is easy. In other words, making sure you didn't miss to put rel=noreferrer everywhere is way harder.
- detaro 8y agoAnd it still makes somewhat sense to not entirely rely on it, given people still use browsers that do not support it.
- martin_a 8y ago> It's a simple way of making it impossible to see the actual Referer to external website It's about tracking outbound links, not about masking the referrer. As already mentioned, there are standard ways for that.
- k_bx 8y agoTracking can be done in JS via onclick event also. What makes you so sure it's not about masking referrer?
- martin_a 8y agoBecause I've done tracking like that for several years, lots of services are still doing it this way and because rel="noopener" or rel="noreferrer" is the way to go if you want to mask the referrer. Even Google recommends to do it that way[0]. If you are not using it for tracking, there is no point in doing it like this after all. [0] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/noopener https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/no...