279905 - PHP session data saved in $_SESSION is dropped in Firefox, Mozilla works fine

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 263057

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Ivica Mikic]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

All PHP session data saved in $_SESSION is dropped on the transition from the
second to the third page if a user is logged in (username and password saved in
$_SESSION). It works fine for one level, from the first to second page, but then
it just disappears. However, if I only save the shopping cart (which is a PHP
object, it consists of other PHP objects - shopping cart items) then the session
data is carried over from page to page with no problem. Every page contains PHP
statements: 
"session_write_close();" and "session_start();". Session id stored in a cookie
is preserved. It only happens with Firefox, while Mozilla, Opera and Internet
Explorer work fine. So far, it's been tested only on Windows platform.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. User logs in to access his/her account.
2. The next page, which shows his settings shows fine.
3. If (s)he clicks on "Account History" to see his/her purchases Firefox, drops
all the session data (username and password). Because of that the script
redirect him/her back to the home page.

Actual Results:  
The script redirects the user back to the home page since it's not logged in (no
username and password preserved in the PHP $_SESSION variable.

Expected Results:  
Preserved the session data (username and password), then the account history
page would be shown.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Are you hitting bug 263057 by not having a /favicon.ico and starting a new
session with your error handling as Firefox desperately tries to request it? You
can tell if that's it by either putting a /favicon.ico on the server, or by
using about:config to set browser.chrome.favicons to false.

Comment 2

[Ivica Mikic]

If I turn browser.chrome.favicons to false, it works fine. Also, I can place an
empty (dummy) favicon.ico file in the root directory and then it works fine too
(with browser.chrome.favicons = true).

However, the problem occurs only on the second level (when getting to the next
page after initial login), and it doesn't occur if username and password are not
involved (other session data is preserved then).

However, I am surprised that this problem exists only in Firefox, but not
Mozilla, obviously the difference between the two causes this problem.

This problem is pretty serious and I think that Firefox shouldn't be released to
public with it.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 263057 ***