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

[Adam Barth]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> 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.

Ojan probably has more concrete data.  I think we got one or two
complaints, but no major problems.

Adam