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Referrers in iframesTuesday 23 December 2008 Yet another in a recent spate of browser discoveries, this one has to do with displaying pages in iframes, and how referrers work with them. Here's the quiz: suppose page A displays page B in an iframe. What is the referrer for page B? The answer is simple: page A. Now suppose that B contains a link to page C. Click the link, and the iframe now shows page C. What referrer is used for C? The answer isn't so simple. Turns out Firefox 3 and Safari 3 both report that C's referrer is B, while IE 6 reports that it is A! I don't have IE 7 or 8 at the moment to try. BTW: all these niggling browser behavior posts are the result of trying to hire a web front-end developer, and me having to help out while we look...
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Comments
you hardly see iframes used anymore anyway these days, as ajax-like techniques like element.innerHTML are so much more common (and easy with libs like jquery....)
@mike, that's true. In this case, we're displaying a photo cube editor on a partner's page. Iframes are the simplest way to keep their world and our world separate while providing a seamless experience to the user.
What is equally as frustrating is when another site frames your site (if you allow it) into an intermediate framed page. From memory, this results in your site not seeing a referrer at all.
As an example:
Site A, URL 1 (normal)
Site A, URL 2 (frame, Site B)
From a web statistics stand point, Site B doesn't see a referrer because the user clicked from URL 1 to URL 2. If they start interacting with Site B within the frame, it is completely separate.
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