As a web developer, I’m often doing new (and interesting) things to stretch the boundaries of the browser. Sometimes, in doing so, the browser can hang or freeze, remaining in a state that makes it unresponsive.
Here are a few simple methods to force-close the browser on Windows and Linux, they can be expanded for other software executables as needed.
Windows:
taskkill /f /im iexplore.exe
taskkill /f /im firefox.exe
taskkill /f /im chrome.exe
taskkill /f /im safari.exe
Linux/Unix:
for i in `ps -A | grep firefox | awk '{print $1}'`; do kill -9 $i; done