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Comment by antifa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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

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

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.

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?

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