Chromium policy on JavaScript dialogs
History of JavaScript dialogs
JavaScript was introduced in 1995, and in the very first version of JavaScript
were methods on the window object named
alert(),
confirm(),
and prompt().
While they fit into the JavaScript of the time, their synchronous API is problematic for modern browsers. Because the JavaScript engine needs to pause until a user response is obtained, the JavaScript dialogs are app-modal. And because the dialogs are app-modal, they commonly (and unfortunately) are used to harm our users.
Because of this, the Chromium team highly recommends that you not use JavaScript dialogs.
Alternatives
There are many options for dialog replacement.
There are several choices for alert()/confirm()/prompt(). For notifying the
user of events (e.g. calendaring sites), the
Notifications API
should be used. For obtaining user input, the
HTML <dialog> element
should be used. For XSS proofs-of-concept, devtool’s
console.log(document.origin) can be used.
As for onbeforeunload, it should be noted that it is already unreliable. As
Ilya Grigorik points out,
“You cannot rely on pagehide, beforeunload, and unload events to fire on
mobile platforms.” If you need to save state, you should use the
Page Visibility API.
Changes
The ability for a page to specify the onbeforeunload string was
removed in Chrome 51.
(It was also removed by Safari starting with Safari 9.1 and in Firefox 4.)
alert()/confirm()/prompt() dialogs are being changed. Rather than being app-modal,
they will be dismissed when their tab is switched from.
(Safari 9.1 already does this.) This is fully enabled on the canary and dev channels
and partially enabled on the beta and stable channels, and will be enabled more in the
future.
The current plan for beforeunload dialogs is to require a user gesture
to allow them to show. (This would not change the dispatching of the beforeunload
event.) This aligns Chromium with Firefox, which made this change with
Firefox 44.
Because of these changes, if your site uses dialogs, it is highly recommended that you move to using the earlier-mentioned alternatives so that this will not affect you.