Detecting the close of a browser

Rails
1

Hi,

I noticed that www.meebo.com has the ability that when you close the
browser during a session, it prompts you , are you sure you want to
close?

How does it do this? I would like to use such an ability , so that if
the user preempts a close on the browser, I can kill all threads I have
running for that user.

Thanks

2

On 7/10/06, Randomuser [email protected] wrote:

Hi,

I noticed that www.meebo.com has the ability that when you close the
browser during a session, it prompts you , are you sure you want to
close?

How does it do this? I would like to use such an ability , so that if
the user preempts a close on the browser, I can kill all threads I have
running for that user.

That’s not really Rails-specific, but you may wish to look for info on
JavaScript/onclose:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=javascript+onclose&btnG=Google+Search

There may be other ways to do it, but ‘onclose’ is one.

Thanks

I hope that helps.

Sincerely,
James Anderson.

3

Randomuser wrote on 10.07.2006 22:30:

Hi,

I noticed that www.meebo.com has the ability that when you close the
browser during a session, it prompts you , are you sure you want to
close?

How does it do this? I would like to use such an ability , so that if
the user preempts a close on the browser, I can kill all threads I have
running for that user.

onUnload JavaScript

4

Using the Javascript onunload definitely isn’t 100% perfect. It’s got so
many browser compatibility issues. After trying to use this piece of
javascript, we ended up with other techniques to end sessions aside from
onUnload to act as a fail safe measure.

For a time, when we were contemplating on how meebo was using onUnload,
we were even thinking if that confirmation box/alertbox honestly had any
logic behind it (was it really closing sessions) because it sure was
difficult to work with.

Just some thoughts.

Thanks,

Bing

5

How does it do this? I would like to use such an ability , so that if
the user preempts a close on the browser, I can kill all threads I have
running for that user.

(See other post in this thread for a JavaScript means of alerting on
.close())

If you mean you wish to clean up server-side threads, then be sure to
have some other failsafe means of performing the task – if the client
is not JavaScript enabled, has JavaScript turned off, or simply drops
off the Internet (or in dozens of other scenarios) then no notification
will be coming from the user to tell the server to clean up their
threads.

FWIW, I’d probably greasemonkey to /dev/null anything that behaved even
remotely like that example site’s behavior. $0.02. :slight_smile:

Rick

http://www.rickbradley.com MUPRN: 670
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