What is "initiator other" in network in chrome console?

Question

I fire an image tag when someone converts on our website for reporting and analytics:

<img src="https://example.evyy.net/conv/?somechannel=cats&cid=3790&oid=123&cat1=premium&sku1=123&qty1=1&amt1=456&custid=qbc" />

We noticed traffic decline yesterday. To debug I visited the site and signed up, with the console open network tab.

I typed "evyy" into the filter box and I see 3 line items for my tag.

What does this mean? Should there not be just 1 line item? One item has a 302 status and the other two a status of 200. That's good right?

Screen attached. Does this look "right"? Is there any drill down in the network tab I can look at to see if there is a problem on our end with tracking?

Sleigh

Answer 1

"Initiator Other" usually means the network request was made from a user, not from Chrome, a redirect or a script.

The request was fired when someone clicked a button (this is what your analytics is probably tracking). You can read more about this in the Chrome DevTools docs.

Initiator: The object or process that initiated the request. It can have one of the following values:

1. Parser - Chrome's HTML parser initiated the request.

2. Redirect - A HTTP redirect initiated the request.

3. Script - A script initiated the request.

4. Other - Some other process or action initiated the request, such as the user navigating to a page via a link, or by entering a URL in the address bar.

The requests are made in the order you see, the first received the 302 response which said, "hey, go to this new url". That's (probably) why the second request was made, which got the 200. The third was probably from clicking on the button too. Looks fine to me.

Dasteel

"Other" will also show up for preloaded requests. That is, if you send the header Link: /style.css; rel=preload; as=style for /, both / and /style.css will list "Other" in the "Initiator" column. – Incompetent

It could also happen if you use JavaScript to inject an HTML tag that loads content, like an <img /> tag. – Windhoek

@Incompetent I'm seeing that too, for one of my two websites. The other one however says 'Push' in that location. The only difference is that in the second site I send separate Link headers for each resource. It seems like it's working though because if I remove one of the 'pushes' then that reverts back to Initiator: index. Also see blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-support-for-http-2-server-push-2 – Stirk

Is it a real request? – Handtohand

It will also happen if the url is loaded during the submit of a form. E.g. When user clicks the submit button or presses enter in an input inside a form – Wilbur

Is can also happen if css initiates a request, for example background-image etc – Repetition

Interestingly Cloudflare requests that are pushed show Push / Other and direct form IIS it shows Other. Very odd! Not sure why the difference. Anyone know? – Stirk

Looks like when you use rel=modulepreload that will come from Cloudflare as Other and they won't be included in cf-h2-pushed header even though they actually are being pushed. – Stirk

Will also happen if there is a meta refresh element i.e. <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="30"> – Bumblebee

Also happens if you're doing CORS requests; javascript's fetch will automatically do preflight HTTP OPTIONS requests, and those show up as "other" as well. – Jago

It also can happen when a a service worker update is attempted automatically by the browser i.e. calling navigator.serviceWorker.register('/sw.js') after the worker has already been installed and the update conditions are met. – Kamerun

Answer 2

I noticed another case not related with a user action:

<link rel="icon" type="image/jpeg" href="image.jpg" />

... causes the image.jpg to get loaded with "Initiator Other" (also true with images of another format).

(wanted to add this as a comment under the previous answer, but I am not allowed to)

Nannette

Answer 3

One case where initiator type is 'other' is when a request gets redirected, in this scenario the redirected request will have initiator as other. For Example: request was made for url1 which got redirected to url2, now in case of url2 we get initiator type as 'other'

Jodyjoe

As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center. – Feverish

Answer 4

This will also cause this kind of error:

<img src="undefined">

Kaka