Catching a tab close event in web browser?

Question

Is there any way of knowing if the user closes a tab in a web browser? Specifically IE7, but also FireFox and others as well. I would like to be able to handle this situatio

Answer 1

I'm sure the OP is asking from the context of the web page itself, but for any Firefox-addon-developers who come across this question, you can use the TabClose event. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Code_snippets/Tabbed_browser#Notification_when_a_tab_is_added_or_removed

Answer 2

As Eran Galperin suggested, use onbeforeunload. Particularly, return a string, and that string will be included in a confirmation dialog which will allow the user to choose whether or not to leave the page. Each browser includes some text before and after the string you return, so you should test in different browsers to see what a user would be presented with.

Answer 3

onbeforeunload also gets called on the following events -

* Close the current browser window.
* Navigate to another location by entering a new address or selecting a Favorite.
* Click the Back, Forward, Refresh, or Home button.
* Click an anchor that refers the browser to another Web page.
* Invoke the anchor.click method.
* Invoke the document.write method.
* Invoke the document.open method.
* Invoke the document.close method.
* Invoke the window.close method.
* Invoke the window.open method, providing the possible value _self for the window name.
* Invoke the window.navigate or NavigateAndFind method.
* Invoke the location.replace method.
* Invoke the location.reload method.
* Specify a new value for the location.href property.
* Submit a form to the address specified in the ACTION attribute via the INPUT type=submit control, or invoke the form.submit method.

So, if you are trying to log out the user if they close the tab or browser window, you would end up logging them out everytime they click a link or submit the page.

Answer 4

Attach an "onbeforeunload" event. It can execute code just before the browser/tab closes.

Answer 5

If you need to know when the page is closed at the server side, your best bet is to ping the server periodically from the page (via XMLHttpRequest, for example). When pinging stops, the page is closed. This will also work if the browser crashed, was terminated or the computer was turned off.

Answer 6

Does document.unload not do it if you?