Is there a way to close a tab in WebDriver or Protractor?

Question

Is there a way to physically close a tab via Protractor or WebDriver?

I ask because while I know how to switch tabs programmatically, but it does not bring the acti

Answer 1

First of all, selenium does not provide a reliable cross-browser API to work with browser tabs. A common approach to open or close a tab (although not quite reliable) is to invoke browser shortcuts for Chrome:

• open tab: CTRL/COMMAND + T
• close tab: CTRL/COMMAND + W

In protractor, find the body element and "send keys" to it:

var body = element(by.tagName("body"));
body.sendKeys(protractor.Key.chord(protractor.Key.CONTROL, "t"))
body.sendKeys(protractor.Key.chord(protractor.Key.CONTROL, "w"))

Or, using browser.actions():

browser.actions().keyDown(protractor.Key.CONTROL).sendKeys('t').perform();
browser.actions().keyDown(protractor.Key.CONTROL).sendKeys('w').perform();

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Also, to open a new tab, there is an interesting hack (introduced here), which basically injects a new a element into the page and invokes click mouse event:

function openNewTab (url) {
    return browser.driver.executeScript(function(url) {(
        function(a, url){
            document.body.appendChild(a);
            a.setAttribute('href', url);
            a.dispatchEvent((function(e){
                e.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, true, false, false, false, 0, null);
                return e;
            }(document.createEvent('MouseEvents'))))
        }(document.createElement('a'), url)
    );
    }, url)
};

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There is also window.close() function, but it would not close the tab if it was not opened via window.open() (reference). In other words, if this is a tab you manually open, then you can use window.open() -> window.close() approach with the help of browser.executeScript().