can i remove the X-Requested-With header from ajax requests?

Question

I wanted to know if anyone has had experience with trying to remove the 'X-Requested-With' header from the ajax request made by jquery (or plain JS). is it possible?

2nd part: do you know if Grease Monkey's ajax requests set this header?

Thanks

header looks like this:

X-Requested-With XMLHttpRequest

Answer 1

jQuery doesn't expose a method to do this at the moment, there was a ticket on it a while back related to Firefox errors, but rather than making it an option, they fixed the error issue in Firefox.

If you're curious, you can see where it's added here, but you can't remove it without editing/overriding jQuery core: http://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/src/ajax.js#L370

Answer 2

"2nd part: do you know if Grease Monkey's ajax requests set this header?"

No, Greasemonkey's GM_xmlhttpRequest() does not set this header (although you can certainly add it).

The default request issued by GM_xmlhttpRequest() looks just like a normal browser request.
For example:

GM_xmlhttpRequest
({
    method:     "GET",
    url:        "http://google.com/",
    onload:     function(response) {alert(response.responseText); }
});

---

Looks like this to my packet sniffer:

GET / HTTP/1.1
    Request Method: GET
    Request URI: /
    Request Version: HTTP/1.1
Host: google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...