XMLHttpRequest.withCredentials

The XMLHttpRequest.withCredentials property is a Boolean that indicates whether or not cross-site Access-Control requests should be made using credentials such as cookies, authorization headers or TLS client certificates. Setting withCredentials has no effect on same-site requests.

In addition, this flag is also used to indicate when cookies are to be ignored in the response. The default is false. XMLHttpRequest from a different domain cannot set cookie values for their own domain unless withCredentials is set to true before making the request. The third-party cookies obtained by setting withCredentials to true will still honor same-origin policy and hence can not be accessed by the requesting script through document.cookie or from response headers.

Note: This never affects same-site requests.

Note: XmlHttpRequest responses from a different domain cannot set cookie values for their own domain unless withCredentials is set to true before making the request, regardless of Access-Control- header values. 

Example

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('GET', 'http://example.com/', true);
xhr.withCredentials = true;
xhr.send(null);

Specifications

Specification Status Comment
XMLHttpRequest Living Standard WHATWG living standard

Browser compatibility

Feature Chrome Edge Firefox (Gecko) Internet Explorer Opera Safari (WebKit)
Basic support 3 (Yes) 3.5 (1.9.1)[2] 10[1] 12 4
Feature Android Chrome for Android Edge Firefox Mobile (Gecko) IE Mobile Opera Mobile Safari Mobile
Basic support ? ? ? (Yes)[2] ? ? ?

[1] Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9 supported cross domain requests (CORS) using XDomainRequest.

[2] Starting with Gecko 11.0 (Firefox 11.0 / Thunderbird 11.0 / SeaMonkey 2.8), Gecko no longer lets you use the withCredentials attribute when performing synchronous requests. Attempting to do so throws an NS_ERROR_DOM_INVALID_ACCESS_ERR exception.

Document Tags and Contributors

 Contributors to this page: erikadoyle, teoli, MashKao, fscholz, jsx
 Last updated by: erikadoyle,