Avoid seeing “before you leave” messages in Firefox

Published on 20^th August 2024 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

After updating a page in a Textpattern instance that I have, I got a pop-up message asking me to confirm my intention to leave the editor page. While recalling that there was a way to avoid these extra dialogue boxes, I could not remember what it was. In any case, it was hardly as if I needed to add extra mouse clicks to my day, even if there may have been good intentions on the CMS developer’s side.

The solution going into about:config. If doing this for the first time, you will be presented with a confirmation screen with an override tick box for later incursions. Once past the screen in question (assuming that you have not overridden it at a previous encounter), the next step is to search for dom.disable_beforeunload and set its value to true, since the default value is false.

While that did what I needed, I also noted another option called dom.require_user_interaction_beforeunload with a value of true. One has to wonder if setting that to false instead of changing dom.disable_beforeunload would have a similar effect. When I tried this, dom.require_user_interaction_beforeunload did not work as fully as dom.disable_beforeunload. Thus, I suggest sticking with the latter for now.