javascript self destructing web page [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

window.close and self.close do not close the window in Chrome (17 answers)

Closed 9 years ago.

I have a web page with a countdown and redirect to the previous page which works great, but instead of redirecting to the previous page, I want the page (current browser tab) to close. disappear. self-destruct. I have tried substituting my redirect history.go(-1) with window.close() but it didn't work.

JS:

var countdownfrom=9    
var currentsecond=document.redirect.redirect2.value=countdownfrom+1

function countredirect(){
    if (currentsecond!=1){
    currentsecond-=1
    document.redirect.redirect2.value=currentsecond
    }
    else{
        history.go(-1)
    return
    }
    setTimeout("countredirect()",1000)
}    
countredirect()

HTML:

<form name="redirect">
    <h1>Oops! &nbsp;I think you meant to use a URL...</h1>
    <h2>this page will self destruct in</h2>
    <form>
        <input type="text" size="1" name="redirect2">
    </form>
    <h2>seconds</h2>
    <h3>Go back to where you came from and try again!</h3>

the html doesn't look right, can you even have a form nested in another form? It works fine though.

Corrected HTML:

    <h1>Oops! &nbsp;I think you meant to use a URL...</h1>
    <h2>this page will self destruct in</h2>
    <form name="redirect">
        <input type="text" size="1" name="redirect2">
    </form>
    <h2>seconds</h2>
    <h3>Go back to where you came from and try again!</h3>

Answer 1

This should be an informative answer: why doesn't my window.close work

Long story short, you probably are not meeting the criteria to close a window with JS.