Based on all the answers on this thread, I wrote the following code and it worked for me.
If you have only some input/textarea tags which requires an onunload event to be checked, you can assign HTML5 data-attributes as data-onunload="true"
for eg.
<input type="text" data-onunload="true" />
<textarea data-onunload="true"></textarea>
and the Javascript (jQuery) can look like this :
$(document).ready(function(){
window.onbeforeunload = function(e) {
var returnFlag = false;
$('textarea, input').each(function(){
if($(this).attr('data-onunload') == 'true' && $(this).val() != '')
returnFlag = true;
});
if(returnFlag)
return "Sure you want to leave?";
};
});