Enable Cool Burning Animation on Window Close in Ubuntu 20.04 / Higher

A new Gnome extension was created a few days ago to revive the old fashioned ‘windows on fire’ compiz effect.

When you click to close an app window, it fires the window and burns it down quickly. This useless but cool feature is developed by Simon Schneegans, who also has a few other great projects including Fly-Pie, GNOME Pie, and Desktop Cube.

The extension so far supports for GNOME 40 & 41. Which means, you needs Ubuntu 21.10, Fedora 34+, and/or Arch Linux. It somehow works very well in my Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME 3.36.

Install Burn Windows Effect:

1. Ubuntu user needs to first press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, and run command to install the ‘chrome-gnome-shell’ package:

sudo apt install chrome-gnome-shell gnome-shell-extension-prefs

Also install ‘gnome-shell-extension-prefs’ package to manage extensions:

2. In your web browser, go to the extension web page and turn on the toggle icon to install it:

Burn My Windows

NOTE: Ubuntu 21.10 has Firefox as Snap package by default, which does not support installing Gnome Extensions so far. Use another browser or install Firefox as native DEB.

Don’t see the toggle icon? Use the ‘Click here to install browser extension‘ link to install browser extension and refresh the page.

After installation, try closing an app window and enjoy the new effect!

Uninstall the Gnome Extension:

To remove the extension, either go to the web page again and turn off the toggle icon. Or, search for and open ‘Gnome Extensions’ app from activities overview screen: