How many redirects do browsers follow (updated 2015-04-07)

Date: 16 Dec 2012
Author: Erik Dubbelboer

Today I was wondering how many 302 redirects browsers would follow before stopping. There are some posts about this but I couldn’t find a source which was up to date and included all browsers. So I decided to make my own:

BrowserRedirects
Firefox 6 - 3720
Chrome 22 - 2320
Chrome 41 20 but will automatically retry after a couple of seconds
Opera 12 20
Opera Next 29 20
Safari 6 - 8 16
IE 6 100
IE 7 10
IE 8 10
IE 9 - 11 110

And here’s the little nodejs script I used to test this.

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function(request, response) {
  var n = parseInt(request.url.substr(2));

  if (isNaN(n)) {
    n = 0;
  }

  console.log(n);

  response.writeHead(302, {
    'Location'      : '?' + (n + 1),
    'Cache-Control' : 'no-cache, must-revalidate',
    'Expires'       : -1,
    'Connection'    : 'close'
  });

  response.end();
}).listen(12345);
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