Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:Force-Quit ONE Window

I'm begging for this feature... How often does it happen that during a browsing session, you have a huge amount of windows open, one webmail (or wiki) containing a freshly composed text, unsaved... and then, unexpectedly, you open ONE webpage which freezes the whole browser! It can be a poorly designed myspace-page which tries to display 7 videos and 15 slideshows at the same time... or a binary download which isn't recognised as such, so that firefox has to open 20 Mb of gibberish in one window... or an embedded java applet which tries to fry the CPU...

Of course you can force-quit and restart Firefox, but in this worst-case example you will lose the text you just spent an hour to edit. And the most absurd, at least in my experience as a OSX user, is that you still can SWITCH among the different browser windows (with the OSX Exposé feature), but the close button isn't working...

It would be really great if Firefox, like an operating system which is able to force-quit one problematic app, could "force-quit" the troublesome window in some manner.

In such cases, it's also not a solution to simply quit and "restore the previous session", because this will also open the problematic webpage, which quite likely will crash firefox again!

Might my prayers be heard... ;)

'Minor' Edit Made; _(-)(Ø)_ 22:34, 29 December 2007 (PST)▼

Maybe as a workaround to the problem you have undergone, they could instate/Implement # 16 on my list: Firefox Sessions Option. (Just like Crash recovery, only this time, you can choose to save the current session as a file or in a file and when you open up Firefox again, have it prompt you to select a session to start from or start new session if you want; creating, naming, and organizing sessions just like you would bookmarks.)

That way, if you think it Might happen again, you can fall back on a stable and previously saved sessions so you can rest at ease :). That combined with Tab/Window Traffic Control, which I will touch upon later though not here, you can go back from a previous session that went sour and NOT load the Troublesome page; just as if it were a time machine :D.

No if its Crash Prevention your after, I hear that Opera has this thing called Shawdowing that does something similar to what you just suggested; it prevents itself from crashing, somehow. Though I don't know all the details, at this point in time, I'll try and touch upon it later if I can.

Please remove my input herein, if need be so.▲

I agree with the original proposal - single windows should be quittable.

The problem is related to general concurrency considerations. For example, one sometimes experiences in FF that a long-running javascript code blocks the whole user event handling (mouse clicks on tabs etc). Preferably those site code could be executed at much lower priority (with a small icon maybe indicating if the js thread is still running on a page, if it takes longer then some usual limit, 1 sec). Then such a tab would at least stay manually closable.

A clearer hierarchy of execution threads would be desirable.

--ThomasP, Jan 2009