[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 56397] Suppress modal JavaScript/HTML dialogs during unload events

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56397





--- Comment #40 from Darin Fisher (:fishd, Google) <fishd at chromium.org>  2011-06-15 16:38:52 PST ---
(In reply to comment #39)
> > We considered that approach but it was rejected by the user experience folks as being an unpleasant user experience.
> 
> Did they consider that there is no user experience to affect? Web pages aren't displaying alerts from unload, so regular users aren't going to see any difference either way.
> 
> I'm not sure if we can have a meaningful discussion here if there is a third party that mandates such behavior for Chrome.

There is no mandate.  However, folks on the Chrome team have discussed this issue, and we all agreed that we didn't like hiding and re-showing a tab.  Adam was summarizing that, and it is true that our "user experience folks" agree.  Regardless, we can certainly talk about this topic here.

My take:

I have long argued that hiding a tab and showing it again would be a jarring experience.  I also contend that if it is the last tab, then it will be really wonky to hide the entire window and then show it again.

Keep in mind that it can take seconds before the unload handler runs as you may need to swap a child process back into memory.  Meanwhile the user has gone to work on something else.  It is not good UI to then pop back up the window they previously dismissed, possibly forcing them away from what they were doing.

Moreover, because it is rare that unload handlers call alert, I believe that we would avoid a great deal of complexity (extra state) by NOT having to code support for it at all.  The complexity of hiding and re-showing the tab or browser window would be avoided too.  We already have a lot of complex code for allowing alerts to be generated as a child process is being torn down to be replaced by a different child process all housed within the same tab.  I would love to delete that code!

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