Silence all "before you leave" messages in Firefox
Published on 20th 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 browser 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, even if some may view it as a heavy-handed way to go.
Since writing this, I have come across the same behaviour on the WordPress profile page on my admin back end. The cause was LastPass updating a field on there, which I tried to stop it doing. When that would not work, this was the only solution that I was sure would work, even if it means being careful in other places if I do not want to lose work.