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Why your browser loses cookies when following hyperlinks from an Excel spreadsheet or Word document

Henning Koch
December 18, 2012Software engineer at makandra GmbH

Microsoft Office pre-fetches hyperlinks using an internal DLL Show archive.org snapshot (which doesn't know about your cookies), follows all redirects and opens your browser with the result. This is because of stupidity.

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The "fix" is to not redirect but just render a text like "access denied" with 200 OK when you see that request.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'].include?('ms-office').

Posted by Henning Koch to makandra dev (2012-12-18 18:34)