PHP session doesn't work with IE

Question

I have a site made with php which uses server side sessions throughout the site.
In fact, it's a site with a user login which depends on session variables and if there were a problem with all session variables, no pages would load at all.

On the site, there's an iframe that holds a feed of little messages from other users.
Those little messages have clickable photos next to them that open the user's profile.
Now, each page requires some formatting to open the user's profile on that specific page...there's really only a few problem pages, but those pages have to have the onclick functions formatted a little differently or they break the page.
So I set a session variable on each page ($_SESSION["current_page"]) that lets the feed know how to format the clickable photos. Now Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari all work as they are supposed to.
But IE6 and IE7 are having problems on the pages that require special formatting.
So after pulling my hair out a bit, I eventually got around to printing my session variables form the server.
And lo and behold, on the special pages, ($_SESSION["current_page"]) is always set to "main" instead of "special1" or "special2".

I printed the same session variable in Firefox and all the other browsers I mentioned and they print out "special1" or "special2" as they're supposed to.
Can anyone think of something - possibly related to the fact that the feed is in an iframe??? - that would cause IE to treat server side session variables differently or somehow launch page "main" silently in the background?
I have checked the feed very carefully for any reference to page "main" - it doesn't seem like there's any ways it's loading that page.

this doesn't make sense to me.

Answer 1

Session data is stored on the server side, not the client. I would check the other pages, where this value would be set.

Answer 2

I had the same problem with ie7 and this is what I do:

If you have this problem using a IIS or Apache in Windows Server, look at the URL where you are redirecting it must be writed in the same way as the URL where you was before the redirection.

For example: site.com/pages/index.php redirection to site.com/Pages/index2.php is going to loose the session in IE7 because the capital letter in Pages.

Answer 3

I found if you added header('P3P: CP="CAO PSA OUR"'); to the top of your doc. It seems to have fixed the problem.

Answer 4

Try testing the page while using some sort of monitoring proxy (I use Fiddler) and see what pages the browser requests. That might give you some clues to what's going on.

Also, try capturing the requests/responses from different browsers and see what IE is doing differently (order of requests, content of requests?).

To pinpoint the problem, can you rewrite the code without using SESSION (it's mentioned in one of the other answers)? Maybe IE is accessing the pages in different order than other browsers? Maybe it is requesting the main page more than once, which means that the session var is set to "main"? Without session variables, the pages won't affect each other's state.

Answer 5

Maybe it's session.cookie_lifetime. I have faced the same problem. I updated session.cookie_lifetime: 4500 to session.cookie_lifetime:0. This means the session cookie never expires until the browser shuts down.

Answer 6

If I understand it correctly, you are trying to use a session variable to pass data from a page to pages within iframes on that page? This doesn't seem a good way to go about it - why not just pass a GET variable into the iframe url i.e. ?current_page=special1 . I would think this would be more reliable as it does not rely on session state.

Remember also that the session variables will be the same for several pages of the same site that are open on a user's PC (e.g. on multiple tabs), which could cause odd behaviour.