I'm writing some tests with Selenium and noticed, that Referer is missing from the headers. I wrote the following minimal example to test this with https://httpbin.org/headers:
import selenium.webdriver
options = selenium.webdriver.FirefoxOptions()
options.add_argument('--headless')
profile = selenium.webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_preference('devtools.jsonview.enabled', False)
driver = selenium.webdriver.Firefox(firefox_options=options, firefox_profile=profile)
wait = selenium.webdriver.support.ui.WebDriverWait(driver, 10)
driver.get('http://www.python.org')
assert 'Python' in driver.title
url = 'https://httpbin.org/headers'
driver.execute_script('window.location.href = "{}";'.format(url))
wait.until(lambda driver: driver.current_url == url)
print(driver.page_source)
driver.close()
Which prints:
<html><head><link rel="alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" href="resource://content-accessible/plaintext.css" title="Wrap Long Lines"></head><body><pre>{
"headers": {
"Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8",
"Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, br",
"Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.5",
"Connection": "close",
"Host": "httpbin.org",
"Upgrade-Insecure-Requests": "1",
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0"
}
}
</pre></body></html>
So there is no Referer. However, if I browse to any page and manually execute
window.location.href = "https://httpbin.org/headers"
in the Firefox console, Referer does appear as expected.
As pointed out in the comments below, when using
driver.get("javascript: window.location.href = '{}'".format(url))
instead of
driver.execute_script("window.location.href = '{}';".format(url))
the request does include Referer. Also, when using Chrome instead of Firefox, both methods include Referer.
So the main question still stands: Why is Referer missing in the request when sent with Firefox as described above?
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