How browser delete session or delete history works?

Question

Let a user using Mozilla browser, On three tabs he login to his yahoo account,gmail and hotmail. Now if we Clear Recent History, all three session will be cleared.

But at the same time if there is another session in any another browser it will not be cleared.

So What i am trying to ask here is, the cookies and session related details,browser cache will be in the local computer and it will be cleared on clearing history.

But is it browser specific? The cookie and all will have any browser specific id, how it will differentiate that now clear the IE history or clear chrome history.

Answer 1

For the server to keep track of a client session a session id is sent to the client. Which the client uses in each request to the server.

On the local computer each browser has it's own way of saving the cookie files. So when you clear the cookies in Firefox, then the cookies saved by Firefox will be deleted. Same thing with Chrome, IE, Safari etc.

They could even be using a own way of serializing the cookies for all that I know.

Answer 2

You can in fact use two different accounts on two different browsers at the same time. The browser history/cookies etc are specific to the browser in question.

There isn't a "standard" where browser save their settings, each do it as they file. MSIE might use the Windows Registry while Firefox might use a local database file.