With HTML5, web pages can store data locally within the user’s browser.
Earlier, this was done with cookies. However, Web Storage is more secure and faster. The data is not included with every server request, but used ONLY when asked for.
The data is stored in name/value pairs, and a web page can only access data stored by itself. Unlike cookies, the storage limit is far larger (at least 5MB) and information is never transferred to the server.
The difference between localStorage and sessionStorage involves the lifetime and scope of the storage.
Data stored through localStorage is permanent: it does not expire and remains stored on the user’s computer until a web app deletes it or the user asks the browser to delete it. SessionStorage has the same lifetime as the top-level window or browser tab in which the script that stored it is running. When the window or tab is permanently closed, any data stored through sessionStorage is deleted.
Both forms of storage are scoped to the document origin so that documents with different origins will never share the stored objects. But sessionStorage is also scoped on a per-window basis. If a user has two browser tabs displaying documents from the same origin, those two tabs have separate sessionStorage data: the scripts running in one tab cannot read or overwrite the data written by scripts in the other tab, even if both tabs are visiting exactly the same page and are running exactly the same scripts.
