As per Difference between webdriver.Dispose(), .Close() and .Quit()
driver.close closes the current active window where driver.quit closes all of the windows. What I get is if I opened a new tab in my current window and then called driver.close the whole windows including my tabs would close. But when I run that code
driver.get("http://testingpool.com/selenium-ide-part-1/");
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[@id='content']/div[2]/article/div/div[2]/div[1]/p[8]/span/a")).click(); //opens a new tab
ArrayList<String> allWindowHandles = new ArrayList<> (driver.getWindowHandles());
driver.close()
only the first tabs gets closed. Also I find that my allWindowHandles has length of 2 although I have only one window.
I was trying to open a new window using Selenium as per https://www.tutorialspoint.com/how-to-open-a-new-window-on-a-browser-using-selenium-webdriver-for-python using
((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("window.open('')");
but that resulted in a new tab not a new window.
I am confused if Selenium differentiates between a tab and a window at all or not.
>Solution :
With the terminology used to distinguish between driver.close() and driver.quit() methods supported by Selenium WebDriver in the post you are referencing to, they actually mostly mean browser tabs, not windows.
By opening a new browser window with
((JavascriptExecutor)driver).executeScript("window.open('')");
or by clicking on some web element opening a new browser tab/window is will normally open a new tab in the existing browser.