Chrome: Blocking HTML Referer [sic]

It's easy to block HTML referrers in  Firefox: visit about:config and set network.http.sendRefererHeader to zero.

It's easy to block referrers in Opera: Make sure "Send Referrer Information" is unchecked at Opera | Settings | Quick Preferences

So how about Chrome? The man page is incomplete, not saying how to do this.

Googling sent me to a a Chrome extension. I have no reason to trust the author of that extension, so I looked a little more.

The answer is, surprise, in the Chrome help forum,  http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=63a866565ba8664f&hl=en

The thing is, I don't usually start Chrome from the command line, and I don't recommend doing so. If Chrome (or Firefox, or Evince, etc.) are given a command shell, they dump gobs of junk to, probably, stderr. So it's necessary to change the shortcut from which Chrome starts. Gnome instructions follow; Windows instructions, untested, are here. [ Note added 2012-09-10: I think the following is incorrect and that Firefox does require an extension to block referers. Bad Firefox, bad. Original text: I do not endorse their method of blocking referrers in Firefox, as it is simply not necessary to install an extension to do this. ]

In System | Preferences | Main Menu | Internet (your system may vary) right-click on Google Chrome. Add --no-referrers to the end of the command line. Kill Chrome. Restart Chrome through the updated shortcut.

On referrers: this is from a time when the Internet was a less dangerous place. I have trouble seeing how this was ever a good idea, but now it is simply an invasion of privacy. It isn't likely that any subsequent version of HTML will drop this, but it would be nice if browsers would default to not sending referrer information.

A note on the misspelling 'referer': the word was misspelled in RFC 1945 (!996 Berners-Lee, Fielding, Frystyk), which is a bit odd since they spelled 'referred' correctly. Wikipedia says the misspelling originated in a different document, by a different author. Fielding says that neither 'referer' nor 'referrer' were in the UNIX spell program at the time. I thought by 1990 everyone was using ispell or aspell; okay I never actually thought that. Paper dictionaries weren't available at the time? I'm just happy to not have my name as prominently associated with a dumb little mistake like this. Of course, it is just a dumb little mistake.

Blocking the HTTP Referer, Take 2

I was about to post that RefControl now seems to work on all my systems, but double checked and, alas, no. RefControl is broken on Firefox 3.5 running on Ubuntu 9.04. Time to systematically uninstall RefControl on all my Linux boxes and install Web Developer on each. I can't have a privacy tool that sometimes works on some systems.

Web Developer Add On: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
Testing for broken referer blocking: grc.com or http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jmartens/courses/is430/infoleak.shtml

Blocking Referer Page

By default, browsers tell servers what page they're coming from, i.e., the page on which the link to the page was clicked. The justification for this is hazy--I can't imagine why I would want to give this information to any server.

I used to use RefControl to block referring information (note the HTTP spelling is referer[sic]). Unfortunately, the current version of RefControl doesn't work with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.14) Gecko/2009090216 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.14, so I went in search of something that would work. I tried No-Referer and Refspoof, neither of which appear to work at all.

A little Googling led to the Web Developer Toolbar, which does successfully block the referring page. It's a bit heavier weight than I wanted, but it works, and it does have other features I may use over time.

Check to see if your referer information is shared.

Nice Firefox Extension

The Firefox RefControl add-on is a very nice little improvement to web browsing privacy. Why should a web server care what page I was last at? I think the reason is most often marketing, and thus the obvious preference is to not send referral information at all. RefControl allows one to do (or not do, that is) exactly that. It also provides some other options, but the most important thing IMHO is that one doesn't tell web sites exactly what Google search one came from, etc.

What web page are you coming from? This will tell you what one server thinks.

To install the add-on click tools, click add-ons, and then click get extensions.