584748 - Give sites some means of recognizing when a new tab has been opened

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Joshua Davies]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8

This is somewhat related to bug #117222; I've read through the comments there and most of the concerns seem to be related to breaking existing behavior.  This multiple tab problem is biting us, though - we're seeing users who shop in multiple tabs, pick one tab, and try to purchase whatever was in that tab.  Unfortunately, since each tab shares the same session ID, the state of their shopping cart is whatever was in the last tab they interacted with, not the tab they chose to go forward with.  This leads to irate users (IE has the same problem but they don't have an open Bugzilla forum to request enhancements in).

Even disabling session cookie tracking and going back to URL rewriting won't fix this, since "open link in new tab" propagates the session ID in the URL to the new tab.

Ideally, we'd like to support the experience that the user expects - which is that a new tab "forks" the current session, and any changes they make to the session from that point forward is unique to that tab.  In order to do this, though, we need to have some means of distinguishing tabs from one another.

So I'd like to submit this modest proposal.  Certainly Firefox must have some way of recognizing that two tabs to the same domain are open simultaneously.  Would it be possible to insert a customer header - e.g.:

X-Instance-Identifier: 2

into the HTTP requests originating from the second tab?

This wouldn't break any existing sites, since most would just ignore it, but at least the site maintainer would have a means of recognizing what's going on and try to address it on their side.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open http://www.travelocity.com (or any other e-commerce site; I've yet to find a site that doesn't reflect this same issue), select anything.
2. Open a new tab to the same site, select something else.
3. Click back to the first tab, try to continue.  Your shopping cart contents will show what you selected in the second tab
Actual Results:  
Making changes in tab #2 changes the state of tab #1

Expected Results:  
Ideally, each tab could be manipulated independently

Comment 1

[Henrik Skupin [:whimboo][⌚️UTC+1]]

Which extensions do you have installed? Can you please test in Safe Mode (http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe%20Mode) with all of those disabled?

Comment 2

[Joshua Davies]

Thanks, I didn't know about that.  Yes, I see the same behavior in safe mode.