Randomly Losing Session Variables Only In Google Chrome & URL Rewriting

Question

Using Google Chrome, I'm seemingly losing/corrupting session data when navigating between pages (PHP 5.0.4, Apache 2.0.54). The website works perfectly fine in IE7/8, Firefox, Safari & Opera. The issue is only with Google Chrome.

I narrowed down the problem. I'm using search friendly URL's, and hiding my front controller (index.php) via a .htaccess file. So the URL looks like: www.domain.com/blah/blah/ Here's the .htaccess file contents:

Options +FollowSymlinks 
RewriteEngine on
#allow cool urls 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php [L] 
#allow to have Url without index.php 

If I remove the .htaccess file, and expose the front controller in the URL: www.domain.com/index.php/blah/blah/, Chrome works perfectly fine.

Any thoughts ideas? I'm thinking it's some kind of problem with how Chrome identifies what cookie to use and send to the server? This happens in Chrome 4 & 5. Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the same issue, and to fix it I only had to create a favicon.ico and place it in the webroot - otherwise I could see using Fiddler that a 404 resulted for this with every page request from Chrome (despite me not actually linking to a favicon in the page markup).

In my mind this is clearly a bug in Chrome, as the lack of a favicon should have no bearing on session data.