IE 7 and session data

jkurrle

I am currently working on a website that uses a javascript call to opens a display window. Embedded in the URL is the PHP session information. Everything works great, until I upgraded a test computer to IE 7. All of a sudden, session data blows up!

The oddest thing is if I put an echo statement in like

echo " ";

all of a sudden, session data is restored and everything works!

Has anyone run across a work around that is more elegant than mine for IE 7?

Nothing like a buggy browser to make your day...

NogDog

Can't say I've run into anything like that. The echo makes me think it has something to do with sending HTTP headers, since headers don't get sent from a PHP script until the first output is sent, but with the limited information at this point I can't imagine why that matters with one browser and not another.

jkurrle

If you google "IE7 losing session data", you'll see a ton of posts out there on it. Apparently, IE7 doesn't handle sessions correctly with a number of scripting languages. I figured someone had already run into it here and was curious to see what solution they used to fix it...

NogDog

Well, the browser doesn't really "handle sessions"; all it does is receive/send cookies, including the session cookie PHP sends it.

What I have run into with IE7 is that depending on it's privacy setting, it will reject certain cookies "silently". Instituting a compact privacy policy on your site will help several of those situations. Also, setting session.cookie_domain to ".yourdomain.com" (note the leading period) may help resolve situations where one link uses the subdomian ('www." or whatever) while others do not.