Forcing Firefox And Thunderbird To Quit After Timeout

[Pleng]

Guess here is as good a place as any to ask this question.

I use Firefox and Thunderbird portable editions and I have them linked into my dropbox account so I can access them from all of my computers. The only trouble is that I tend to leave the applications open on one computer, forget about them, then load them on another computer. This leads to hundereds of file clashes which, especially with Thunderbird, can be quite disastrous.

I've checked on the extension directory and there appears to be no extension available for either to force an exit after a certain period of inactivity. Is there any other way to force them to exit after, say, 30 minutes of inactivity?

 

[dnlgreenwood]

Guess here is as good a place as any to ask this question.

I use Firefox and Thunderbird portable editions and I have them linked into my dropbox account so I can access them from all of my computers. The only trouble is that I tend to leave the applications open on one computer, forget about them, then load them on another computer. This leads to hundereds of file clashes which, especially with Thunderbird, can be quite disastrous.

I've checked on the extension directory and there appears to be no extension available for either to force an exit after a certain period of inactivity. Is there any other way to force them to exit after, say, 30 minutes of inactivity?

What operating system are you using? It might be possible to write a script that kills the task. I remember writing a batch program similar to this, but that was like... 6 years ago.

Or maybe you could set the computers to sleep or hibernate after 30 minutes of not being used.

 

[Pleng]

I'm using Windows (7 and XP). I don't really just want to kill the tasks after 30 minutes, as that would mean it often would get killed while im still using it. And I can't just force the OS to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, because it's always doing stuff in the background.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

I'm using Windows (7 and XP). I don't really just want to kill the tasks after 30 minutes, as that would mean it often would get killed while im still using it. And I can't just force the OS to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, because it's always doing stuff in the background.

hm... I wonder if there is some way to tell if you've been inactive... OH! maybe one could create a screensaver that kills the task! I've heard of cases where malicious screensavers do horrible things. Screensavers are executable...

or write a program that checks for input (keyboard/mouse/gamepad) and if there is no input for x time, kill y task...

well, if I had more programming experience I could whip something up, but I haven't done anything programming related in at least half a year.

 

[Pleng]

I'm using Windows (7 and XP). I don't really just want to kill the tasks after 30 minutes, as that would mean it often would get killed while im still using it. And I can't just force the OS to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, because it's always doing stuff in the background.

hm... I wonder if there is some way to tell if you've been inactive... OH! maybe one could create a screensaver that kills the task! I've heard of cases where malicious screensavers do horrible things. Screensavers are executable...

Hmmm that's not a bad idea... I might load up visual studio and see if there's a pre-set for screen savers