I am wondering how to close pop ups that won't close?
The internet has many articles recommending ways to close a browser popup window without infecting your computer with malware. I've seen you click the red X, use ALT-F4, go to the windows taskbar, right click on your browser's icon and close the window, click file-exit in the browser. I believe all of the above recommendations, while easy to perform by the user, can be intercepted with a javascript function call which means performing those recommendations could download malware onto your computer. And the only safe way to close a popup window is through the task manager and killing the browser process. Is that correct or are some of the recommendations mentioned above really safe to perform when closing a popup window?
Below are the steps on how to close pop ups that won't close -
- Click the red X --> Popups can masquerade as a browser dialog window
- Alt+F4 / Taskbar>Exit / Browser>File>Exit --> Javascript can indeed trigger an action on page close (which also happens on exiting the browser because the page has to be closed to do so - just tested while writing this post)
Therefore it is correct to say that the safest option is to to Ctrl+Alt+Del and kill the process. This is safe because (in Windows) Ctrl+Alt+Del is a secure key combination that can only be intercepted by the OS, so it can't trigger any Javascript in the browser (it can't trigger anything actually). The Ctrl+Alt+Del link above also has some commentary about what it does in other Operating Systems.