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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

No, blocking them from iframes is just the first step. alert/confirm/prompt are absolutely in danger of being deprecated and eventually removed.

Browser makers have declared they’d like to remove them altogether: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/2894. But they’re too popular to remove under current policies unless they’re really causing harm, and I do believe there’s serious risk of them classifying it that way. (They’re actually a bit of a maintenance burden, as three of the few remaining synchronous things.)

Remember also the big difference between deprecation and removal. I’d go so far as to say I think it’s likely that alert/prompt/confirm will be deprecated and produce console warnings in at least one major browser before four years pass, though I don’t believe they’ll yet have justified going ahead and removing it.

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Your link says the exact opposite of everything you wrote.

The post is by a random dev who doesn't work at a browser, and it was closed by someone who does after they said they don't deprecate things unless they plan on removing them.

It’s definitely not the best source—the best sources are scattered about the place and probably more just murmurings than clear statements of intent—but it does include one positive signal from browser and spec makers, annevk on the reason for reopening it:

> I figured it deserved some more implementer input especially since there seems to be interest in removing them eventually

It’s not spelled out clearly, but I believe from what I’ve seen of processes there and from what I’ve read elsewhere that he’s talking about implementer interest rather than just-anyone interest. Consider also how Chromium actively gathered usage statistics and Firefox wants to, which you only do if you want to remove the thing.

They definitely want to remove it altogether, they just don’t reckon it’s feasible at this time, and it’s definitely not a high priority for them.

There are other sources, most likely to be found in previous discussions on HN of this rough topic, but regular search for this stuff is just about impossible now because it’s been drowned by stuff pertaining to the block in cross-origin subframes.

(bryik and anonydsfsfs have now found better citations, refer to their comments.)

The link titled "Deprecate alert(), confirm(), prompt()"?

I dunno, why did the OP cite this?

Yes, it's an issue created by a random person on GitHub.

I think they may have meant to link this instead:

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/6897#issuecomment-8857...

there's also another reply to the parent with a link to the chromium issue tracker confirming this

That someone in the WhatWG thread works for Google, and is the same person saying they will be removed in the chrome developer mailing lists, quoted and linked above.

In fact, almost every argument for their removal seems to be made by the same person. There doesn’t seem to be any other evidence of browse makers having consensus on this.

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