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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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