How to add a panic button to your web browser

If you're not breaking laws or causing harm, it's really up to you what you look at online – we won't judge. But there may be occasions when you don't want someone in close proximity to see the contents of your open tabs, and that's where the browser's panic button, which is able to shut down the browser with the push of a button, can come in handy.

Some of the more innocent reasons you might do this are if you're playing games at a time when you should be working, and your boss stops by, or maybe you're planning a surprise vacation for a loved one, and he or she says your loved one comes into the room. As for the less family-friendly reasons, well, you can use your imagination.

Whatever you end up using to hide, it's reassuring to have a panic button on hand, so we're happy to see that Opera GX – the spin-off of Opera designed specifically for gamers – now has one As a built-in feature. If you don't want to use Opera GX as your main browser, you can get the same kind of functionality on other browsers with the help of third-party extensions.

According to a survey conducted by Opera, 36 percent of participants admitted to looking at “inappropriate content” while at school, college or work, and nearly a third of these people said they had been caught red-handed. Even if you think you don't need a panic button, it seems a lot of others do.

Use Opera GX panic button

Opera GX, if you're new to it, is a browser for gamers: you can set limits on CPU and GPU usage, and there are built-in integrations for Discord, Twitch, and more. You can download the latest version of the browser for Windows or macOS from here.

The panic button has not yet turned into a full-fledged native feature, you need to enable Early Bird mode in the browser. Click the Easy Setup icon (slider icon, top right), then Enable in settings Next to Early Bird. Once the toggles are on, you'll need to restart Opera GX, and then the panic button will be ready to go.

When you need to hide open tabs in a jiffy, tap F12 (If you're not using a full-sized keyboard, you may need to know the equivalent key combination.) The tabs you've been looking at aren't gone forever because you can click on them F12 again to bring them back. Currently, you cannot change the panic button switch.

By default, the Panic Button will open a “boring” website when you press F12, such as Google Docs or GitHub. If you want to change the location that the panic button appears after you hide all your current tabs (your company's home page, for example), click the Easy Setup icon again, then choose Go to full browser settings And Panic button.

Add panic button to other browsers

Unfortunately, other browsers do not yet have a panic button built into them, although it is useful to keep in mind that you can quickly hide all open windows with a single key combination – this key combination is Win + Down arrow On Windows and Cmd+M on macOS, which may help you in a difficult situation.

The panic button can be set up in some other browsers using extensions. For Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, there are a few options, but the name is apt Panic button It looks like the best thing ever: once you install it, you can click on it Ctrl+Shift+Z (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+Z (macOS) to make everything disappear in an instant.

However, note that your open tabs will disappear forever, and the last 24 hours of browsing history will be automatically cleared as well – a more radical approach than the one used by Opera GX. You can adjust which website opens when Panic Mode is activated, but that's the only customization option.

There is, too Panic button Extension available for Firefox: With this add-on, you can hide open tabs by clicking the extension button on the toolbar or pressing F8. You can set your own hotkey if you want, and the extension can be customized in other ways, too: you can choose the “safe” website that appears when you activate the panic button, plus you have the option to bring back the mini-tabs or get rid of them altogether.