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

Santosh is right, this event will be triggered on many more actions than just clicking the close button of your tab/browser. I've created a little hack to prevent the onbeforeunload action to be triggered by adding the following function on document ready.

       $(function () {     
        window.onbeforeunload = OnBeforeUnload;
            $(window).data('beforeunload', window.onbeforeunload);
            $('body').delegate('a', 'hover', function (event) {
                if (event.type === 'mouseenter' || event.type === "mouseover")
                    window.onbeforeunload = null;
                else
                    window.onbeforeunload = $(window).data('beforeunload');
            });
        });

Also, before you trigger any of the events mentioned by Santosh, you need to run this line:

window.onbeforeunload = null;

If you do not want the event to be triggered.

And here's the final code piece:

    function OnBeforeUnload(oEvent) {   
            // return a string to show the warning message (not every browser will use this string in the dialog)
            // or run the code you need when the user closes your page  
        return "Are you sure you want to close this window?";       
    }