Preventing a site to reopen in a new tab

PHP
1

Hello

I have been looking around for a solution to my problem and thought I might get some help / ideas here.

If my website is opened in a browser, the same website should not open in a new tab of the same browser. Is this possible anyway?

Thanks

2

It’s… theoretically doable, but would require some sneaky link coding. Why do you need to do this, though? There’s likely a better solution.

3

Its a requirement from the client.

4

I don’t think that will be easily doable without a lot of hackery. Chrome, for example, hosts each tab in its own process, and I don’t think it will be easy to communicate between tabs/ windows in such a situation.

Save yourself a lot of hassle and tell your client that that isn’t the way browsers work.

Having said all that:

  1. when the site is opened, use JS to set a random name for the window (window.name = “random string”)
  2. save this in a PHP session
  3. any requests coming from different window names within the same session? show them a ‘not allowed’ message

Evil.

5

i would’ve just said “sorry, that’s not possible”

what was the client’s reason for this requirement?

maybe you’re “fixing the wrong problem”

here’s one of google’s results for that phrase – http://www.positive-way.com/business/root1.htm

6

I agree with Rudy. Any solution you can implement to attempt to stop the same person opening multiple copies of the page can be easily bypassed (unless it is a member’s only area where they have to log in first and where logging in on a second tab would invalidate the session on the first tab).

So find out why the client has that requirement and resolve the cause of their request instead.