window.close

The Window.close() method closes the current window, or the window on which it was called.

This method is only allowed to be called for windows that were opened by a script using the window.open() method. If the window was not opened by a script, an error similar to this one appears in the console: Scripts may not close windows that were not opened by script.

Syntax

window.close();

Examples

Closing a window opened with window.open()

This example shows a method which opens a window and a second one which closes the window; this demonstrates how to use Window.close() to close a window opened by calling window.open().

//Global var to store a reference to the opened window
var openedWindow;

function openWindow() {
  openedWindow = window.open('moreinfo.htm');
}

function closeOpenedWindow() {
  openedWindow.close();
}

Closing the current window

In the past, when you called the window object's close() method directly, rather than calling close() on a window instance, the browser closed the frontmost window, whether your script created that window or not. This is no longer the case; for security reasons, scripts are no longer allowed to close windows they didn't open. (Firefox 46.0.1: scripts can not close windows, they had not opened)

function closeCurrentWindow() {
  window.close();
}

Specification

Specification	Status	Comment
WHATWG HTML Living Standard The definition of 'window.close()' in that specification.	Living Standard
HTML5 The definition of 'Window.close()' in that specification.	Recommendation

Browser compatibility

[1] Starting in Firefox 46.0.1, Window.close() can no longer close windows that weren't opened by the same script. This is a security precaution.

See also

MSDN: window.close Method