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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

I was perfectly fine with Chrome's usability until I started getting a `Hold Command + Q` to quit` prompt on my Mac. Before then, I hadn't even considered the possibility that an application could block me from quickly and easily quitting out of it. Now I have to hold the key combo or double tap it to quit Chrome, and it is the only application I have to do that for. It's so annoying.

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To Disable: Uncheck "Warn Before Quitting" on the "Chrome" menu - in between the Apple menu and "File" menu.

it doesn't help when you're testing via automated software - test runners will open up chromes, then often fail and leave them open, and the 'warn before quitting' is always defaulted to on.

Pretty sure you can choose a profile with specific settings if launching from selenium or cli.

I'm surprised that functionality isn't possible to disable, but tbh I really like it. Too many times a finger slip turns Cmd+W into Cmd+Q and suddenly I'm lost a whole pile of tab state, possibly even half-submitted forms. Yuck.

Surely that can be restored? In firefox, if you accidentally close a window, there’s a “Recently closed windows” thing in the history menu you can use that brings back all the tabs.

That is true, however this results in all your tabs getting refreshed. For e.g. ProtonMail, this means you have to login (get out your 2FA device etc) all over again.

It can, and things are better than ever as far as preserving (most) form state, sessions, and scroll positions, but it's not perfect. Just as one example, pages opened on one network (eg at work) won't be able to reload elsewhere unless I take the extra step of connecting to the VPN. This is not the end of the world, but it's an annoying detour when I really just wanted to close that one tab.

And it's so rare that I shut down the whole browser anyway, so it makes sense to me to make it hard to do accidentally.

It's possible to disable as mentioned in another comment.

I worked around the accidental-Command-Q problem in Firefox by setting up a custom keyboard shortcut using the paid app Keyboard Maestro (https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/). I have a macro “Confirm Command-Q to Quit” that intercepts the ⌘Q keystroke, only in Firefox, and instead shows a floating dialog titled “Really quit Firefox?”. The Cancel button in the dialog stops the macro, and the Quit button continues the macro to the next step, which is a Quit Firefox instruction.

Another possible workaround is to go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts and create a new shortcut. You can specify that in the app Firefox, the menu item “Quit Firefox” should have the shortcut ⌥⌘Q. Then a normal ⌘Q should do nothing.

This is extra weird because browsers have become really good at preserving state between closing and restarting.

The real answer to potentially destructive moves is not to ask the user twice, but to let the user easily undo.

It's also to keep chrome apps and notifications working. I use Hangouts a lot. Though I generally deny notifications for anything else. For most anything that I would use persistent I tend to use an external app anyway (even if it's just an electron wrapper).

FWIW, this behavior is trivial to disable (though I agree it should not be on by default: I actually had remembered it not being on by default). It was really important for me, as once a month I would accidentally hit cmd-Q and then sigh the sigh of the damned as I wait for what is effectively a reboot of my entire computer (as the only two things I tend to have open are a terminal and a browser).

Ironically, I love that feature and wish I could have it on my other apps, especially on Firefox.

I've fat fingered Cmd-W and Cmd-Q too many times, and while it's easy to restore, it takes a couple minutes, a lot of bandwidth, and spins the CPU to 100% for a while. Which really sucks when you're on battery.

I use the add-on "Disable Ctrl-Q and Cmd-Q" because of this. To actually quit with the add-on enabled, you must click the Quit Firefox menu item.

Easy to do with Hammerspoon: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/349766

Firefox: about:config, set browser.showQuitWarning to true

Honestly as much as I dislike chrome the “hold cmd q” behavior has saved me many times and I kind of wish safari did it: cmd-q and cmd-w are very close to each other :)

I actually love this and was waiting for this feature for a long time. I can't count the times I quit chrome by mistake.

You can disable it though.

This bugs me big time, I wonder what was the decision behind such inconvenient UX.

I'm guessing Google apps like Hangouts and notifications. To keep you from accidentally completely closing.

On Windows it silently keeps running in the background most of the time if you have apps or notifications running.

How is it inconvenient? It prevent accidental quits!

I use ctrl-q as my shortcut key in tmux. I can't count how many times I accidentally sent that into the wrong window :) I consider showQuitWarning in Firefox a necessity.

IMO, no application ever should quit from one key combination without confirmation.

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