Preventing multiple browser sessions on the same server session

Question

I\'m sure we\'ve all worked on, or are aware of web applications (especially in the enterprise) that have tightly bound themselves to the server session. In these cases, it

Answer 1

I worked on a single window web application many years ago (pre-dating "Web 2.0"). We simply launched a new window without any toolbars (no back button, etc) and disabled right-clicking. We took care to create a very usable in-session navigation system. This was enough to prevent almost all accidental duplicate browsing. This was an intranet application; obviously I'd never recommend doing anything like this on a general website.

Personally, I don't like the sound of the ping detector. I would just make sure that no data corruption can ever possibly occur. Multiple browser sessions is not a valid excuse for that... although I understand how it can be problematic. But if you want to add a ping detector on top of perfectly working code, then it might serve as a helpful reminder to the user.

You could add a unique token to the end of every link. If the unique token is used more than once (e.g., opening a new window, bookmarking, back, forward), then the request could be denied. With proper tracking, you could ensure that it's never possible to get from one page to another without taking a valid path. This approach is more reliable than the ping (as it is controlled by the server), but could result in a very annoying user experience.

The short of it is: fix your application to not corrupt any data. I know that may not be a trivial thing, and I don't mean to make light of it. Implementing pings and such may help make the problem disappear, but I guarantee you that if something can go wrong, it eventually will. :-)