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Chrome browser: beginning around Sept/Oct 2020 'Continue Shopping' goes to root/main page of site

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When shoppers using the Google Chrome browser add items to the cart (or view the cart) from my store pages and then use the Continue Shopping button, they are returned to the main page of the site instead of the page that they added to/viewed the cart from (e.g they added from 'https://mydomain.com/catalog/mypage.html' but are returned to just 'https://mydomain.com/'). Why is this happening, and what can I do about it?

UPDATE 8/19/2021 - testing with the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, and Edge indicates that this is now an issue for those browsers as well, they all eventually follow what Chrome does. Note that older browsers no longer being updated, such as Internet Explorer and Safari for Windows, still do not have this issue.

ShopSite's cart uses the HTTP_REFERER environment variable provided by the browser to determine what page the shopper was on before entering the cart. If the browser doesn't provide this variable at all, then ShopSite will not be able to determine where the shopper came from and will default to sending the shopper back to the URL you have indicated in the 'MyStore URL' setting in Preferences > Hosting Service. However, if this is only happening in Chrome and the shopper is always returned to the root of the referring domain, then this is likely due to the default Referer-Policy change made in Chrome version 85 and newer as described in the following Chrome developer blog entry:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/07/referrer-policy-new-chrome-default

So this will typically be an issue for stores that have their store pages on a different domain than the domain used by the shopping cart (e.g. store pages at a domain like 'https://mydomain.com/' and the shopping cart going to 'https://myhostsdomain.com/', etc) . There are at least two possible options to get Chrome to return to the previous default Referrer-Policy and the default policy used by other browsers:

1. Add the following meta tag to the head section of your page that has the ShopSite order buttons:

<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade">

2. Add the following directive to your .htaccess file (or create a new .htaccess file if one doesn't exist) in the same directory as your pages that contain the ShopSite order buttons:

# Referrer-Policy

   Header always set Referrer-Policy "no-referrer-when-downgrade"

If you use the .htaccess method (which is handy if you have a lot of pages with order buttons) and it still doesn't seem to make a difference, check with your host to see if this is a valid .htaccess directive based on their webserver settings.

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