Extracting a list of browser sessions using PHP

u0107

Hello all,

This is my first post.

I did search through the forum and not finding what I am looking for, I am asking this question here as a new posting - apologies in advance if this question has been asked and thank you if someone could post the link to the discussion as areply to this message.

Ok here goes my question:

I am in the process of developing an application for my website using php. As part of one of the functionality, I need to determine how many browser sessions a user who is running my application has concurrently opened on his system. Let me explain by an example:

Internet Explorer Session

Mozilla Firefox Session 1

www.godaddy.com (FTP admin)
www.google.com
maps.google.com

Google Chrome Session 1

www.careerbuilder.com

What I would like to do is to create an application in php which would be deployed on my website which when run will give me:

A list of all the URLs of all browsers that are opened at that moment along with their full URLs.

In the above examples this list will have 8 entries - 4+3+1 - across all browsers. Of course there is also the possibility that there is a second, third and a fourth and a.... session of any or all of the above (or other) browsers which would add to the list of open sessions...

Thank you all in advance and for the patience to go through a first-poster's question.

Cheers!

Uttam

Weedpacket

I doubt that would even be possible: it would represent a major privacy and security breach.

traq

To be a little more blunt: why are the sites I'm visiting any of your business?

NogDog

If you could do it, it would most likely require client-side code (JavaScript?), not server-side PHP. And if you can, in fact, find any way to do it, please let us know which browser(s) allows it, so that I can be sure to never use that browser. 😉

u0107

Hello all,

I saw the first response on my iPhone and did respond that I realised the security issue involved in doing such a thing. I apologise.

The reason why I would like to know a list of what sites are currently being visited is to populate a drop down box on my site. But then there could be sites like one's bank account being visited at that time and would then enable an unscrupulous php coder (NOT ME!) to extract details like the account balance and other private information.

So for my website, I am planning a different route where my users themselves can cut and paste into a text box the complete URL. This would need to be done deliberately by the user and I plan to provide sufficient warnings about the security involved in such an operation.

Cheers!

Uttam

Ashley_Sheridan

Why would any user copy and paste the URLs from their other open tabs into your website? I can think of no good reason why I would ever do this on any site.

traq

I'm a little curious as well. If you believe you have a legitimate use case, I'd be interested in hearing it.

u0107

I definitely have a legitimate case:

On a blog I have, I am offering my visitors to create a database of food recipes which are their favorites. These recipes can be entered as an "add a new recipe" or perhaps extract the recipe from another site and paste it into their user-id's recipe collection. The reason why I want to have extract and store instead of storing the hyperlink in del.icio.us is because most folks like to customize their recipes to their own taste - add more spice to this one, less lemon to the other or cook for 5 more minutes than the instructions in the actual published version. Practically it is impossible to remember and note all these personal customizations from many recipe sites.

What I am looking at is to allow my visitors to simply paste the complete URL into a textarea box and click a go button. If I have the format of that particular website on my blog, I can extract all the parts of the recipe like the ingredients and quantities, steps and so on and paste it it into a new record in my blog's database - accessible uniquely to that particular visitor to my blog. Once extracted, the user can do the customization.

Thanks all.

Uttam

traq

Understandable - but you'll need to make sure that the terms of service of those particular websites allow you to harvest their content in such a way. It might be better (and more reliable, too) to have your users submit the recipes themselves, with a "credit" if they got it from another site.