Referrers in iframes

Tuesday 23 December 2008This is almost 16 years old. Be careful.

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...

» 6 reactions

Comments

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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....)
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@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.
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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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It is true that you see less of iframes today, but you get a lot of that while developing Facebook apps. Further, iframes are still used as ways to sandbox content for whatever reasons.
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The iframe is still a valid HTML element and should be respected as such (whether widely used or not).

@mike Ajax is another method, and one with its own list of bugs/limitations, not a solution.

This problem also occurs in IE7, still no solution other than passing the parent/desired URL within the query string of the iframe.

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