[whatwg] Proposal for Links to Unrelated Browsing Contexts

[Glenn Maynard]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 11:18 AM, Charlie Reis <creis at chromium.org> wrote:

> There are two main differences from the rel=noreferrer feature.  First (as
> you note), this does still send the referrer.  That's useful for sites that
> don't want to be affected by the newly opened page but that still rely on
> referrers for analytics.  From my earlier examples, that might include
> links in social networks (where the social network might want to be seen as
> the source of the referral) or links between apps on the same domain.   I
> suppose it could also be useful for ads.
>
> The other difference is that this proposal supports script-initiated
> navigations, such as window.open(url, "_unrelated").  Gmail is one case
> that depends on using JavaScript to open links from email messages, and so
> it cannot use the rel=noreferrer syntax.
>

That's not a difference between "unrelated" and "noreferrer", though.  It
applies to noreferrer, too.

I had to do this recently (a script-initiated rel=noreferrer navigation).
FYI, I worked around it by creating a temporary HTMLAnchorElement, setting
its href and rel properties and calling click().  A way to do this directly
with window.open would be nice, but it's orthogonal to noreferrer vs.
unrelated.

-- 
Glenn Maynard