Open Bug 495395 Opened 15 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Window ID in request header wanted, to solve problem of session merging

Categories

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

enhancement

Tracking

()

UNCONFIRMED

People

(Reporter: usenet, Unassigned)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; de; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; de; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10

The problem is that cookies including session cookies are shared across all browser windows. This prevents us to store things in a session for many use cases as one window would overwrite the values of other windows. This could easily be solved with a window id passed as request header from the browser. A window ID is just a unique random number.
In HTML 5 this problem is already addressed for the client side with a sessionStorage. I would like to have this solved for the server side as well.

I described the problem on my website and described the solution. You will find a sample application demonstrating the pitfall and the solution with a simulated window id on my blog.

http://www.laliluna.de/blog

Hopefully, the idea is not completely useless and I did not waste to
much of your time. 
Best Regards
Sebastian Hennebrueder

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a program which stores data in the session (You can use my Ruby sample application http://www.laliluna.de/blog)
2. Use the program with multiple browser windows or tabulator 
Actual Results:  
Each browser window influence the others

Expected Results:  
Being able to store data in the session safely by adding a window specific context
I have described a practical use case in web applications which requires a window id to solve it with a reasonable effort. It is about a web application having menu groups opened or widgets displayed. After a reload the same menus (or widets) should be opened.

http://www.laliluna.de/blog/2010/01/18/window_id_practical_use_cases.html

Best Regards

Sebastian Hennebrueder
Another case: a web site that provides services to be included in other websites (such as advertising). On clicking the link a popup window is open to provide service. But the user can open such windows on different web sites plus he may have a main window to manage his account with the service provider. All these windows are likely to use a single login/session but must allow the user to work as if reading several newspapers at the same time (user is really multitasking). Clicking the "Next" link on the window opened from site A should take him to the next page from *that* website-service ("newspaper") and should not be confused with the reading position in website-service ("newspaper") B. Now that showModalDialog is available on all browsers this can really likely happen. I actually need to develop something like this and I may not be the only one.
Severity: normal → S3
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