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

[Sreeram Ramachandran]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 19:08, 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.

Yet, we killed the blink tag and block popups. I don't think there's a
clear consistency here. Some things we deem to have crossed the line,
some we don't. In this case, Ian Hickson has suggested that blocking
alerts might be worth codifying into the standard
(https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56397#c15).