[Tip] Restore Warning or Confirmation Box on Closing Firefox Window

In Mozilla Firefox 94.0 or later versions, if you have opened multiple tabs in Firefox and you click on “Close” button present in the titlebar or you click on “Quit” or “Exit” option present in Firefox Menu, the browser immediately closes the window without displaying any warning or confirmation prompt. This article will help you in restoring the warning box when you try to close Firefox window with multiple tabs opened.

In previous versions of Firefox, whenever you tried to close Firefox window by using titlebar close button, Exit or Quit option or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Q or ALT+F4 hotkeys, Firefox used to show following warning box asking for your confirmation before closing the main window with multiple tabs running:

It was a very helpful feature as many times a user might click on the Close button accidentally and if Firefox doesn’t ask for confirmation, the user will lose all the running tabs.

Now in newer versions of Firefox, Mozilla team has decided to disable this feature by default. Now if you upgrade to install Firefox 94 or later version, the browser doesn’t show any confirmation box when closing multiple tabs.

In my opinion, it’s a bad decision. Warn on closing multiple tabs is an essential feature. The same feature was also not present in popular Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Opera but recently these browsers started implementing the feature and now Microsoft Edge and Opera warn users on closing multiple tabs as mentioned here (1) and here (2).

On the other hand, Firefox team decided to disable this feature which will definitely annoy users.

Fortunately, the functionality is still present in Firefox. The team just disabled the option by default. So interested users can still enable the feature again.

If you also want to bring back the good ol’ warn on close multiple tabs feature in Firefox, following methods will help you:

Let’s start the tutorial:

METHOD 1: Restore Confirmation Box Using Mozilla Firefox Settings

1. Open Firefox and click on the Hamburger icon present at the right-side end of the toolbar to open the main menu. Now click on Settings menu to open Firefox settings page.

Alternatively, you can direct option this page using about:preferences command in address bar.

2. Now under “General” tab, look for “Tabs” section in right-side pane.

3. You’ll see “Confirm before closing multiple tabs” option.

To restore the warning box on closing multiple tabs, enable or check the checkbox for the above mentioned option.

It’ll immediately bring back the confirmation dialog box in Firefox browser.

METHOD 2: Restore Warning Box Using About:Config Page

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. It’ll show you a warning message, click on “Accept the Risk and Continue” button. It’ll open Firefox’s hidden secret advanced configuration page i.e. about:config page.

2. Now type warnon in Search filter box and look for following preferences in the window:

Some of the preferences values would be set to false by default, which means the confirmation or warning box is disabled in your Firefox browser.

3. To enable the confirmation box, double-click on each preference (where the value is set to false) and change their values to true. Alternatively, you can click on the Toggle icon given next to the preference name.

If a preference value if already set to true, don’t change it.

That’s it. It’ll immediately activate and enable the warning box to confirm before closing multiple tabs in Mozilla Firefox.

PS: In future, if you decide to restore default behavior and disable confirmation box in Firefox, set above mentioned preferences/flags to false again.

Also Check:

[Tip] Enable / Disable Warning on Closing Multiple Tabs in All Web Browsers