Share cookie between subdomain and domain

Question

I have two questions. I understand that if I specify the domain as .mydomain.com (with the leading dot) in the cookie that all subdomains can share a cookie.

Answer 1

In both cases yes it can, and this is the default behaviour for both IE and Edge.

The other answers add valuable insight but chiefly describe the behaviour in Chrome. it's important to note that the behaviour is completely different in IE. CMBuckley's very helpful test script demonstrates that in (say) Chrome, the cookies are not shared between root and subdomains when no domain is specified. However the same test in IE shows that they are shared. This IE case is closer to the take-home description in CMBuckley's www-or-not-www link. I know this to be the case because we have a system that used different servicestack cookies on both the root and subdomain. It all worked fine until someone accessed it in IE and the two systems fought over whose session cookie would win until we blew up the cache.