I've been using a Firefox addon called RefControl for a long time now. It forges the referer header to be the root of the website that you're on. I've never not

I've been using a Firefox addon called RefControl for a long time now. It forges the referer header to be the root of the website that you're on. I've never noticed a problem caused by this. We could turn off HTTP referers tomorrow, and the number of sites it would break would be tiny, whilst the benefits to the general public regarding privacy would be humongous This wont happen, because the major browser vendors make money from advertising and tracking. You think Google would do this for Chrome? Microsoft for IE? It makes no sense that your browser should by default tell websites that you visit where you came from. If referers didn't already exist, and Google came along and added them today to Chrome or Microsoft added them to IE, the level of protest would be epic.