Hacker News Reader

Comment by alerighi | Hacker News Reader

Removing alert is nonsense, and I don't think they will ever do (without breaking a ton of websites that use it). Why as a developer should I have to make a modal with HTML+CSS+JS to show it to just have a prompt that inform the user about something?

Ok, alert is ugly, but for a lot of situations (= industrial software) it's perfectly acceptable.

View on HN

Why as a user should I have to endure a website with an intrusive user of alert? I don't care what happens to websites that use alert, I never want to see my browser get locked up because of lazy devs wanting to use alerts.

Alerts haven't locked up the browser since the Bush administration.

Frrl free to update https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8825384/alert-is-bad-rea... with new information.

That question has been closed and locked since Obama's first term

That only because the implementation is poor. It doesn’t have to be intrusive.

Sort of. This can obviously be non-blocking and redirected to whatever stdin-ish receiver you prefer:

  alert('whatever');

This cannot:

  const answer = confirm('A querstion?');
  const value = doSomethingWithUserInput(answer);
  return doSomethingWithValue(value);

The API depends on it blocking the main thread, and removing that expectation is effectively just as disruptive as removing the feature entirely: non-abusive usage would have no reason to call this function if not to block for user input. Introducing some magical suspension of the stack like async/await or generators would break assumptions about the entire concurrent execution model of the language (the inverse problem of “colored functions”, infectious async/await etc).

The best thing they can do without removing the API is provide an escape hatch, which most browsers already do when alert &co are called multiple times in quick succession.

Alert doesn't lock your browser. The developer can spend a lot of time and effort to make an even more intrusive and annoying custom alert.

Why should I as a user have to endure instagram and twitter blocking content with a delayed login prompt that cannot be canceled? Because they can. Browser APIs or not malicious developers will be malicious.

Yes it does. You can't click on the URL bar and just navigate to a different site in chrome while an alert is displayed.

I can.

You can in firefox (just tried from the console).

Some devs want to use the native UI, but this isn’t okay either apparently. So are you advocating that every dev should implement their own alert modal?

Browsers are well equipped to deal with alert() abuse. You can usually block them after the second one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com