[webkit-dev] The case for disallowing alerts in unload, redux

[Adam Barth]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 7:08 PM, Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at webkit.org> wrote:
> 26.06.2011, в 12:10, Adam Barth написал(а):
>>> Interesting - this is much more than I expected , too. So, authors are widely using alerts in onload, and breaking those would be bad for compatibility. If this change is made, 2.3% of users will suffer every week.
>>
>> It would be useful to know what fraction of those users would have a
>> better experience with this change.  Sreeram, of the example sites
>> that you've seen, how many would be improved by suppressing these
>> alerts?
>
>
> I'm not sure if historically browsers were often taking the liberty of crippling widely used features in this way. We didn't kill marquee, for instance. For another example, I know that a lot of users dislike animated GIFs, and yet we haven't removed support for those.
>
> How far would you be willing to go in forcefully improving user experience? We could refuse to render dark backgrounds to make text more readable, for instance.

A counter-example, of course, is popup blocking, which did exactly
that, much to users' delight.

Adam