R – How long do objects stored in Rails’ sessions persist

I would think you'll want to think about if things really belong in a session state. This is something I find myself doing every now and then and it's a nice strongly typed approach to the whole thing but you should be careful when putting things in the session context. Not everything should be there just because it belongs to some user.

in global.asax hook the OnSessionStart event

void OnSessionStart(...)
{
    HttpContext.Current.Session.Add("__MySessionObject", new MySessionObject());
}

From anywhere in code where the HttpContext.Current property != null you can retrive that object. I do this with an extension method.

public static MySessionObject GetMySessionObject(this HttpContext current)
{
    return current != null ? (MySessionObject)current.Session["__MySessionObject"] : null;
}

This way you can in code

void OnLoad(...)
{
    var sessionObj = HttpContext.Current.GetMySessionObject();
    // do something with 'sessionObj'
}

This is apparently by design. Check out this Bugzilla bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=443354

Firefox has a feature where you close Firefox and it offers to save all your tabs, and then you restore the browser and those tabs come back. That's called session restore. What I didn't realize is that it'll also restore all the session cookies for those pages too! It treats it like you had never closed the browser.

This makes sense in the sense that if your browser crashed you get right back to where you were, but is a little disconcerting for web devs used to session cookies getting cleared. I've got some old session cookies from months ago that were set by sites I always have open in tabs.

To test this out, close all the tabs in your browser, then close the browser and restart it. I think the session cookies for your site should clear in that case. Otherwise you'd have to turn off session restore.