968861 - No referer header when the page is reloaded after modifying window.location.hash or history.pushState

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Navigation, defect)

Description

[Jan Loose]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/32.0.1700.107 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. open e.g. http://www.w3schools.com
2. open firebug, click net tab
3. click e.g. Learn HTML (http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp)
4. see the first request (default.asp) -> Referer: http://www.w3schools.com/
5. reload the page
6. see the first request (default.asp) -> Referer: http://www.w3schools.com/
7. switch to console tab of the firebug window
8. run window.location.hash = 'sc=1';
9. reload the page
10. see the first request (defualt.asp) -> no referer header


Actual results:

No referer header is found in the request http header if the history has been changed by window.location.hash or by history.pushState and the page was then reloaded.


Expected results:

The same referer header as before the script was run should be present.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Needs spec check to see what happens here.  I'm a bit surprised we resend the old referrer on reload..

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

But chances are, we don't copy over the referrer URI to the new SHEntry.  Again, the question is what the spec says here.

Comment 3

[O. Atsushi (Torisugari)]

The spec is

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/dom.html#dom-document-referrer
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/dom.html#the-document%27s-referrer

Neither provides sufficient info. However, this seems a valid bug to me.

> But chances are, we don't copy over the referrer URI to the new SHEntry. 

That's right. When LoadURI() is called and the request is simple hash change, docshell go into the short-circuited root so as to skip network things. In that case, the request channel is nullptr.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/docshell/base/nsDocShell.cpp?force=1#9365
> 9365             OnNewURI(aURI, nullptr, owner, mLoadType, true, true, true);

AddToSessionHistory() will tries to set the referrer from the (null) channel, then it clears the referrer.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/docshell/base/nsDocShell.cpp#11086
> 11086     entry->SetReferrerURI(referrerURI);

Comment 4

[Andrii]

Will it be fixed?

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Peter, Anny, if you're redesigning session history anyway...

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

In particular, nsDocShell::AddToSessionHistory only puts referrer info on the new entry if aChannel is not null. But nsDocShell::UpdateURLAndHistory passes null for the channel. So presumably it should copy the referrer state manually. That's for the pushState case. The location.hash case would need something similar.

Comment 7

[Malte Jürgens [:maltejur]]

This has been fixed in bug 761152 and bug 1750706