Revision 1098197 of Referer

<div>{{HTTPSidebar}}</div>

<p>The <code><strong>Referer</strong></code> request header contains the address of the previous web page from which a link to the currently requested page was followed. The <code>Referer</code> header allows servers to identify where people are visiting them from and may use that data for analytics, logging, or optimized caching, for example.</p>

<p>Note that referer is actually a misspelling of the word "referrer". See {{interwiki("wikipedia", "HTTP_referer", "HTTP referer on Wikipedia")}} for more details.</p>

<p>The <code>Referer</code> header has the potential to reveal information about the browsing history of the user, which is a privacy concern.</p>

<p>A <code>Referer</code> header is not sent if:</p>

<ul>
 <li>the referring resource is a local "file" or "data" URI,</li>
 <li>
  <p>an unsecured HTTP request is used and the referring page was received with a secure protocol (HTTPS).</p>
 </li>
</ul>

<table class="properties">
 <tbody>
  <tr>
   <th scope="row">Header type</th>
   <td>{{Glossary("Request header")}}</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <th scope="row">{{Glossary("Forbidden header name")}}</th>
   <td>yes</td>
  </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

<h2 id="Syntax">Syntax</h2>

<pre class="syntaxbox">
Referer: &lt;url&gt;
</pre>

<h2 id="Directives">Directives</h2>

<dl>
 <dt>&lt;url&gt;</dt>
 <dd>fo</dd>
</dl>

<h2 id="Examples">Examples</h2>

<pre>
Referer: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript</pre>

<h2 id="Specifications">Specifications</h2>

<table class="standard-table">
 <tbody>
  <tr>
   <th scope="col">Specification</th>
   <th scope="col">Title</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>{{RFC("7231", "Referer", "5.5.2")}}</td>
   <td>Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content</td>
  </tr>
 </tbody>
</table>

<h2 id="Browser_compatibility">Browser compatibility</h2>

<p class="hidden">The compatibility table in this page is generated from structured data. If you’d like to contribute to the data, please check out <a href="https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/README.md">https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/README.md</a> and send us a pull request.</p>

<p>{{Compat}}</p>

<h2 id="See_also">See also</h2>

<ul>
 <li>{{interwiki("wikipedia", "HTTP_referer", "HTTP referer on Wikipedia")}}</li>
</ul>