IE 8 sharing sessions across windows

Question

In IE 8 when we open two different browser windows we get the same session unless we use the File -> New Session option.

We have two different applications (j2ee) that use the same domain name. This works perfectly fine in IE 7 when the user opens the two applications in two browser windows. However, in IE 8, what happens is that the browser treats both applications as one - and the session is shared. Now, is there any fix that can be done in the application to ensure that we detect a new window (new session) being opened?

Answer 1

Usually you'd host the two applications on different paths, right? If that is the case, just limit your session cookie to the path of the application. So, if you have one application on the path /app1 and the other on the path /app2, then the session ID cookie for the first app should look like:

Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=SOMEVALUE; path=/app1

There should be mechanisms for setting this in your application server. If you give some more details on the application server then we can probably guide to the exact configuration element that needs to be changed.