Detecting if the user browser closes the browser

Question

I have a website with master page. I want to catch a user trying to close the browser/tab. When I try using onunload in the body tag, it fires not only when I try closing the browser, but also when I navigate to another page.

Any idea how to only catch the event of closing the browser?

Answer 1

That is not possible. Javascript can only determine if the page you're on closes. If Javascript could determine whether other tabs and windows you're on closed, for example knowing if you closed down Facebook or Flyspray, that would be a major security risk. That's now how javascript works.

Answer 2

I am working with a secure wizzard online, that will save data through the process, and I needed to detect wether the client closed the tab and/or the browser, so far everything was going allright until I clicked the "continue" button to proceed to the next step, it threw me the same message, I've done quite some research on this and there is no way I'll be able to ignore the unload event that occurs when I navigate away from the pagethrough a link.

I tried to use the

if(window.event.clientY < 0 && window.event.clientX < 0){
    alert('holy damn! the window is closing!')
};

and some other methods that are around the web. none of them will be able to detect only the browser closing. So as far as my research has advanced, there is no way to do this.