[whatwg] Can we deprecate alert(), confirm(), prompt() ?

[Adam Barth]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 2:03 PM, Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at webkit.org> wrote:
> 28.02.2011, в 21:38, Ojan Vafai написал(а):
>> FWIW, chromium is planning on experimenting with disallowing modal dialogs
>> during the beforeunload/unload events.
>> http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68780
>
> What is the big difference between alerts from unload and alerts in general? Alerts are not particularly useful for anything besides debugging, and pagehide/unload handlers is a place where they I've found them particularly useful for debugging.
>
> Do we have at least anecdotal evidence that many sites are showing alerts from unload? When I'm seeing a site that tries to prevent me from leaving it, it's always by returning a string from onbeforeunload.

I believe the motivation is to be able to close tabs quickly.  If a
tab doesn't register for any unload / beforeunload events, the tab can
be kill instantly.  If the site registers for unload but not
beforeunload, then, today, we need to wait for JavaScript to execute
before closing the tab.  Without the ability to trigger alert and
friends during unload, we can hide the tab instantly and unload it in
the background.

We have lots of stats for how many tabs would benefit from this
optimization and how much time would be saved.  It's surprisingly
large.

Adam