Session-cookie handling

Have you noticed? When you log on a site that uses session cookie to store authentication information (like eBay), this cookie is by default shared between all instances (processes) of Internet Explorer.

Also, each tab is opened as a separated process which are all child of the same parent process. This parent process is handling this resource-sharing job.

From a Process Explorer point of view, it looks like this:

This new “feature”, called “Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE)”, is described in details on the official MS IE Blog.

In order to workaround this behavior and be able to authenticate against the same web site but using different credentials, you need to start a new IE parent process which is running separately from the other one and therefore not sharing the same session-cookie. How to do? simply execute IE using the –nomerge parameter: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe –normerge. for convenience, you can create a new IE shortcut which includes this parameter.

After starting this second parent IE, it will look like this in Process Explorer:

HTML5-compliance regarding the file path parameter

While trying to help a newsgroup poster making his IE-related script work with IE8, French MVP Gilles Laurent (Master es scripting and automation), bought to my attention that, in order to comply with HTML5 rules, IE8 was handling file path parameter from a file sector differently.

So in order to prevent information disclosure (the path to a file may include the user name if the file reside under the user 'profile), there are actually two changes combined to achieve that:

• The IE security setting “include local directory path when uploading files to a server” (already present in IE7) is set to “Disable” instead of “Enabled” as it was with IE7 for the “Internet Zone”

• When this setting is set to “Disable”, the path returned will always start with C:\fakepath\FILENAME.EXT instead of starting with the real path

Once again, the official MS IE Blog describes this behavior.

And cut!