Magento: Can’t login/add items in Chrome and IE

Problem: In Chrome and IE, user as well as admin are unable to login as well as add items to cart. In Firefox, everything works fine.

Solution: This is due to the cookie problem, not in browser but in Magento itself. In Magento, by default cookie’s lifetime is set to 3600 (1 hour). But if the end users computer time runs ahead of server’s time, cookies will not get set for magento frontend as well as backend. For example, end user’s computer time is 1 hour forward than server’s time, that means the cookie (holding user’s session id) will expire as soon as user logs in or tries to add an item.

To solve this, set cookie’s lifetime to 86400 (1 day) instead of 1 hour and everything will work as expected. You can also set cookie lifetime to 0, so that cookie will only expire when the user’s browser is closed.

Go to: Magento backend -> Sytem -> Configuration -> Web -> Session and Cookie Management
Set cookie lifetime to 86400 and save. Everything will work as expected now.

Magento 1.5: Cannot login to admin panel after fresh install

After installing magento 1.5, I tried to login to the admin panel with correct username and password, but it does not let me in without any error message. This is due to cookie problem in magento and can be fixed as below:

Open this file in your favorite editor: app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Session/Abstract/Varien.php

Comment lines that says like (probably line number 81 to 83)

$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),

$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),

$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()

to

//$this->getCookie()->getDomain(),

//$this->getCookie()->isSecure(),

//$this->getCookie()->getHttponly()

Now you could login to your admin panel without any problem.