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

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 14 Jun 2011, Adam Barth wrote:
> 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.

Any news on this? If Chrome was able to do this, it would be worth putting 
in the spec to give cover to other browsers interested in the same 
potential performance improvement.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
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