By checking the session variable exist or not while loading th page. As the session will exist longer as till browser closes. The default behaviour for sessions is to keep a session open indefinitely and only to expire a session when the browser is closed. This behaviour can be changed in the php.ini file by altering the line session.cookie_lifetime = 0 to a value in seconds. If you wanted the session to finish in 5 minutes you would set this to session.cookie_lifetime = 300 and restart your httpd server.