detecting a user closing the browser or moving on to a new site

Talguy

I am building a image editor and I want to know if it is possible to detect if the user closed their browser or moved on to a new site. How this ties into the editor is that after the above actions happen php will call a function I would probably call clean up so that it cleans up teh users images in the temp file by using their ip address.

etully

You could put an Ajax script on the page that connects to the server every 30-60 seconds to say, "I'm still here". If the server doesn't hear from a particular session id in 3 minutes, then you can assume that they left the page. (Better to rely on session id's than IP addresses, by the way).

There are Javascript events that can trigger the Ajax script on page close or navigating away but they are very unreliable.

Talguy

ok thanks I'm not good with javascript but I bet I could figure it out eventually.

cheerio

http://www.faqs.org/docs/htmltut/document/_BODY_onUnload.html

etully

Yeah, that "onUnload" is the one that's not very reliable. If the browser crashes, the OS crashes, or their Internet connection goes down, you'll never know they left. And many people have the "onUnload" event turned off because when they want to leave a page, they don't want an alert message trying to bring them back to the page (that's what it's usually used for). If you rely on that event, you'll find your hard drive filling up with images because you never knew they left. That's why a persistent Ajax beacon that says, "I'm still here", is the safest way to fly.

bradgrafelman

Moved this thread to ClientSide Technologies - PHP doesn't know what a "website" or "browser" is.

Talguy

I have all the info I need and this has not really gone into a clientside discussion