Chrome window.print() window.close() results in 'print preview failed'. Solution?

Question

I have a print page that opens in a new tab or window. The resulting page opens a print dialog. After the user makes a selection on the print dialog, the page then closes the tab/window.

window.print();
window.close();

This used to work great in the major browsers, but one of the latest versions of Chrome breaks this (i.e. 14.0.835.202).

I receive the following message from what I guess is the chrome print plugin: "Print preview failed".

Does anyone have a solution to close the Chrome tab/window after printing?

Answer 1

I just managed to come up with a solution that fits me. I started out with the reply from Peru but didn't want to use jQuery in this solution.

window.onload = function () {
  window.print();
  setTimeout(function(){window.close();}, 1);
}

For some reason Chrome dont start the timeout timer until the print dialog is closed.

Answer 2

This question is a top hit on Google so I thought I would add what I found, even though it does not exactly mirror your situation. If you have a link that calls window.print() then its onclick handler must return false or you get the error. This is true even if the link is a hash and goes nowhere!

Print is unavailable because the page you were trying to print has been closed

To fix this make sure you add return false to the link.

<a href="#" onclick="window.print(); return false;" >Print</a>

Here is the Chromium bug that addresses this. It is marked as fixed for Chrome 17 (not yet released) and I have verified the fix in Chrome 18.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=92107