Cookie set for subdomain, but IE Developer Tools show cookie at root domain. What am I missing?

Question

We have a number of sites hanging off a root domain. E.g:

dev.mydomain.co.nz
test.mydomain.co.nz
www.mydomain.co.nz

I monitor my connection to dev.mydomain.co.nz with Fiddler and receive a cookie with a header like:

Set-Cookie: mytest=blah; domain=dev.mydomain.co.nz; path=/

Then in IE10 I use F12 Developer Tools, then select Cache - View cookie information.

It shows me this:

NAME  mytest
VALUE  blah
DOMAIN  mydomain.co.nz 
PATH  / 
EXPIRES  At the end of the Session 

Where'd the "dev" subdomain go?

The weird thing is, if I then make request to test.mydomain.co.nz, it does NOT send the cookie, but a request to dev.mydomain.co.nz DOES send the mytest cookie.

The Resources - Cookies developer tool in Chrome represents the cookies exactly as I'd expect. IE BEHAVES correctly like Chrome, but the developer tools seem to garble the session cookie details.

Is this an IE problem or am I missing something?

Answer 1

There's no distinction between domains and subdomains in IE Developer Tools.

References

• IE Cookie Internals
• Update to Internet Explorer's Cookie Jar