There’s a minor anti-abuse/security argument as well– if a browser tab could blow itself away freely, this might be useful as a part of scareware or other user-experience abuses. The user might’ve been using a tab to explore a set of search results, and if one of those results could blow away both itself and the backstack with the search results page, this would be pretty annoying. While sometimes explained away as nebulous “ Security reasons!“, the core reason is more aligned with simple user-experience- users could lose important state in their browser window or “back/forward” stack (in IE, we called this the TravelLog) if a tab or window went away unexpectedly. Why Do Browsers Limit close()?īefore we dive into what factors govern what happens when close() is called, it’s important to understand why there’s a restriction at all. Scripts may close only the windows that were opened by them.

When looking at the Developer Tools console, they’ll see a message like: Sometimes, Web Developers are surprised to find that the window.close() API doesn’t always close the browser window.

Close all browser windows