Question

This sounded like something almost impossible to do when it was presented to me. I know you can display a dialog box to confirm when leaving a web page. But is it possible to display a dialog box when leaving a site?

I haven’t been able to find/create anything that can read the address bar and know that you’re leaving the site.

Answer 1

First off define which events can actually take your user away from your site?

1. A click of a link inside your web site content
2. A submit of a form to an outside action
3. A javascript from a child window that changes window.location on its parent
4. User starting a search in the search bar (FF and IE)
5. User entering a search/address in the browser address bar.
6. User hitting a back button (or backspace) when it just came to your site
7. User hitting a forward button (or shift-backspace) when they were off the site before but came back by getting there via Back button functionality
8. User closes the browser window

So. what can you do about all these?

1. These are easy. Check your anchors and if they do point outside, add some functionality in the onclick event
2. Similar to 1. Add your functionality for the onsubmit event of the form posting back outside of your site.
3. -> 8. don’t really have an applicable solution that could be controlled. You can abuse onbeforeunload event as much as you want, but you won’t have much success of knowing what’s going on. And there are certain limitations related to onbeforeunload as well, so your hands will be tied most of the time.

The real question?

Why would you want to control this event anyway except for bothering your users not to leave you. Begging doesn’t give much justice in the web world anyway. And when some site would bother me with messages or even worse prevent me from leaving I wouldn’t want to get back anymore. It smells of bad bad bad usability and gives a hint of adware site.

Rather try to keep your users interested by providing them with valuable content.