title: What is the scope of window.name in IE?
body: <p>We have a product that has both a winforms and a web client, and are providing the users a way to launch into another company asset (a web application). We need to make sure that the user only ever has one instance of the other web application open in a browser (or at least that <em>we've</em> opened for them). We accomplished this (sort of) by doing the following...</p>
  
  <p>In the winforms client, we have a hidden WebBrowser control that, when the user clicks the button to launch the other app, we write a small HTML page into the DocumentText property that contains:</p>
  
  <pre><code>window.open('http://othersiteurl', '**sitename**').focus();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In our web client when the user clicks on the same button we do something similar:</p>
  
  <pre><code>window.open('http://othersiteurl', '**sitename**');
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>From only one client or the other this works surprisingly well. Where things get sticky and weird is when you try accessing it from both clients. If you launch the other product from the winforms app first, it launches a new window, and any subsequent launches of the product from either client load in the instance that's already open. But if you do it the other way around, and start from the web client, the first instance launches in a new tab in the same window, <em>but then every launch from the winforms client goes to a new window!</em></p>
  
  <p>I'm using the same value for the 'name' parameter of the window.open in both clients. It's bizarre to see it work so horribly different. Can anyone explain how the 'name' parameter is scoped in IE? (yes, this is IE-only...the WebBrowser control hosts IE, and our product is IE-only) When launching from the winforms client first it seems to be global to all open instances, but the other way around makes it seem very much the opposite.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>