window.close and self.close do not close the window in Chrome

Question

The issue is that when I invoke window.close() or self.close() it doesn\'t close the window. Now there seems to be a belief that in Chrome you can\

Answer 1

I wanted to share my "solution" with this issue. It seems like most of us are trying to close a browser window in a standard browser session, where a user is visiting some website or another, after they've visited other websites, and before they'll visit some more.

However, my situation is that I am building a web app for a device that will essentially be the only thing the device does. You boot it up, it launches Chrome and navigates to our app. It's not even connected to the internet, any servers it talks to are on our local Docker containers. The user needs a way to close the app (aka close Chrome) so they can access the terminal to perform system updates.

So it boots up, launches Chrome in kiosk mode, at the correct address already. This happens to easily satisfy the second option in the spec:

A browsing context is script-closable if it is an auxiliary browsing context that was created by a script (as opposed to by an action of the user), or if it is a top-level browsing context whose session history contains only one Document.

So simply calling window.close() from my kiosk app just works!