This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Why won't Firefox obey <meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer"> meta tag sent in header?

  • 1 reply
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by willsonkr

more options

I need to instruct browsers visiting my site to send a blank referrer back to the site when navigating internally to defeat some tricky bots that have been plaguing us by automatically spoofing the referrer as us. To foil their access I am forcing a captcha on all reported internal referrals.

Firefox is the only browser that insists on reporting the referrer, even when confronted with the meta tag not to.

I am aware of the method to cause it to hide the referrer in local settings, but this doesn't help the random visitor.

Does Firefox prefer another tag (I also tried "none", no luck)? Kind of stumped at it's refusal to cooperate with the standard header instruction. As far as I can tell all other browsers are cooperating.

I need to instruct browsers visiting my site to send a blank referrer back to the site when navigating internally to defeat some tricky bots that have been plaguing us by automatically spoofing the referrer as us. To foil their access I am forcing a captcha on all reported internal referrals. Firefox is the only browser that insists on reporting the referrer, even when confronted with the meta tag not to. I am aware of the method to cause it to hide the referrer in local settings, but this doesn't help the random visitor. Does Firefox prefer another tag (I also tried "none", no luck)? Kind of stumped at it's refusal to cooperate with the standard header instruction. As far as I can tell all other browsers are cooperating.

All Replies (1)

more options

Note: I did just realize the issue might have been a missing trailing slash, but changed the tag to: <meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer"/> and still no bueno.