[ckevinc]

This seems like a great feature, and sadly missing from Chrome.

I have thought of two types of insidious activities on sites today, the onclick popup and the confirm on close.

The onclick popup can be managed (to a small extent) in Chrome by holding the CTRL key and clicking when you have a sense a popup is coming. It doesn't cover all of them, but if you're familiar with a site's actions, you might catch 70% or more of them.

I'm not sure what creates the confirm on close, but I see it on sites that auto play video advertisements (among others). Once you try and close the window/tab - Chrome displays a prompt - requiring you to close the prompt, and then close the tab. Annoying.

I thought of one simple idea in Chrome - have a key combination (perhaps CTRL+SHIFT) that we can hold down while clicking on a link or possible popup, that will (a) open the link in a new tab and (b) NOT load the page or any elements. It simply presents an empty page with the url that we could copy or a tab we can close.

This would add a measure of control and hopefully doesn't break anything.

[ckevinc]

Just to add to this - the javascript event used to capture leaving the open page seems to be: window.onbeforeunload - it would be great if Chrome was able to disable that function entirely, but it doesn't seems possible.