Quick question! Is there a way to change the referrer in Brave? For years, I haven’t installed Brave because they made it so you can’t change the referrer. This is why I’ve always used a hardened Firefox. I’m just wondering if there’s a flag, setting, hack or addon that will allow me to change the referrer in Brave. Specifically, I just don’t want the web site I go to, to know what web site I’m coming from whether it’s blocking, spoofing or showing the origin web site I’m visiting as the referrer.
That’s an interesting topic, and while reasearching this on the web, I’ve found:
Brave modifies the referrer header when making cross origin requests. Brave “lies” on these requests, and says the request was being issued from the same domain being requested, instead of the true, cross-domain origin.
To answer your question, there isn’t a UI element that would allow you to do that. You can change it temporarily when making the request individually - by using developer tools or a proxy.
Even though, Brave did implement privacy features that shouldn’t allow websites to look where you come from.
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This drives me nuts about Brave. I’ve tested it over the years using check referer sites like:
and other sites. To me it’s a big privacy issue. I don’t want a web site to know I came from a Taylor Swift fan site (just kidding), porn site, etc.. Plus the fact that such info could be scraped and used by a data broker to build a profile on me.
I’ve changed the settings in about:config for Firefox and it works perfectly. For anyone interested, the settings are:
user_pref(“network.http.referer.XOriginTrimmingPolicy”, 2); user_pref(“network.http.referer.XOriginPolicy”, 1); user_pref(“network.http.referer.defaultPolicy.trackers”, 1);
user_pref(“network.http.referer.defaultPolicy.trackers.pbmode”, 1);
Too bad Brave doesn’t allow this to be changed. This is a major show stopper for me and goes completely against the privacy they preach their browser represents.