How do you inspect your own session hash when visiting a website?

Question

I am interested to see what people are storing in my session and cookies when I visit websites. Is there any way to see what's in there between request and when I'm on pages in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox?

Answer 1

In Firefox you can use under each Firebug to check the cookies being sent forth and back. Check the Net panel for complete request and response headers. The cookies are present as Set-Cookie response header and Cookie request header.

Here's a screenshot of the transferred headers when requesting this topic:

(note that I removed the user cookie value from the screenshot, else someone else would be able to copy it and login as myself)

You cannot check in the client side in any way what's been stored in the server side session since that's usually not exposed in the cookie values. Only the session identifier is stored as cookie value. You can at highest make some guesses based on the behaviour of the website across the requests.