If I set up a page like this:
<html><head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://internic.net/"></head><body></body></html>
Will the browser send referrer info and other metadata when the redirection is performed?
In testing here, Firefox and IE do not but Chrome does send the referrer (though this is inconsistent as well), regardless of whether it's going to the same domain or not.
Seeing as I can't find any spec stating what should be the standard behavior, and W3C in general discourages a META redirect, I'm not sure you can ever depend on this being consistent.