Tuesday 23 December 2008 — This 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...
Comments
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.
@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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