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Thinkwise login overruled by caching information of other tabpage (e.g. firefox browser)

  • 14 September 2023
  • 3 replies
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In current browsers you can use multiple tabblad. This meand you can login into the thinkwise platform with several users

Situation

Tabblad 1 login of thinkwise in universal GUI

Tabblad 2 login of thinkwise in universal GUI

Action

Tabblad 1: login as user1 and press login

Result user1 is logged in

 

Next Action

Tabblad 2 : login as user2 and press login

Result  user1 is logged in and not user2

Logout on tabblad 2 and login as user2 => result is that user2 is now logged in

 

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Best answer by Vincent Doppenberg 14 September 2023, 11:11

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3 replies

Userlevel 6
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Hello Heini,

This is expected behavior and this is how it works for most, if not nearly all, web applications.

The way that you have written down the steps does make it seem a bit confusing, but this is because you have opened the login page in both tab pages before logging in. Normally, if you would log in on tab page 1 and then open tab page 2 and navigate to the Universal GUI, it will log you in automatically. In your situation, if you would refresh tab page 2 after logging in on tab page 1, you would also be logged in immediately.

The reason for this behavior is authentication cookies and as I said before, this is how nearly all web application operate. This behavior is actually a requirement for Single Sign On to work at all.

If you want to log different users in at the same time, then there are two things you can do:

  • Use a different browser for each user.
  • Use a normal window and an incognito/inprivate window. Please note though that multiple incognito/inprivate windows do share cookies amongst themselves, but they are separate from normal windows.

So if you have Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, for example, then you can log in four users simultaneously by using a normal window and an incognito window on both of these browsers.

I hope this helps.

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Hello Vincent,

I have tested this with other applications, such webmail portals. There I get an expected behaviour

User1 in tablad 1

User2 in tabblad 2

 

Where thinkwise presents me

User1 in tabblad1

User1 in tabblad2, where I have entered the credentials for user2 before pushing the login button

Userlevel 6
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Hello Heini,

There will be some exceptions. Microsoft and Google notably support having multiple accounts signed in at the same time and allow you to choose which one to use upon signing in. So perhaps it was a bit too bold of me to state that nearly all web applications behave like this. However, while these are notable cases, I will stand by my point that it is more common that you cannot sign in with multiple accounts in a single browser profile.

When you try doing this on LinkedIn for example, logging in on a second tab page will override the login on the first tab page. This is slightly different from how we do it (we preserve the original session) but the end result is the same, you cannot have two sessions active on two tab pages.

When you try doing this on GitHub, after logging in on the first tab page, as soon as you activate the second tab page it will tell you that you have already signed in on another tab or window and ask you to reload the page. If you ignore this message and attempt to log in a second account anyway, GitHub will prevent you from doing do.

 

So while there are notable examples that do support such a feature, there are also notable examples that do not and as such it is not unusual behavior.

At the same time it is a valid requirement to have for a web application, so if you would like for us to support this feature as well, then I would recommend creating an Idea for it. This allows us to track the interest for such a feature and report on the current status of it.

I hope this helps.