1416760 - Make all dialogs non modal

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Security, enhancement)

Description

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Using modal dialogs to trick users is far too common. Can we make all dialogs non-modal?

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This was already on file.

Comment 2

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

Bug 616843 is proposing to make the dialogs tab-modal and will require a long time. I'm proposing to make them non-modal completely, which might be quite easier.

Comment 3

[Johann Hofmann [:johannh]]

If you look at the discussion in bug 613785 alone, this is not as easy as "let's just do it". I agree with Gijs that a meta-bug for tracking the different dialogs is the right approach.

Comment 4

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

This is not a duplicate of bug 616843. Bug 616843 is suggesting to make dialogs tab-modal, this bug is suggesting to make them modeless.
If we don't intend to do what suggested in comment 0 (make all dialogs non modal), then we should resolve this bug as WONTFIX.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Marco Castelluccio [:marco] from comment #4)
> This is not a duplicate of bug 616843. Bug 616843 is suggesting to make
> dialogs tab-modal, this bug is suggesting to make them modeless.
> If we don't intend to do what suggested in comment 0 (make all dialogs non
> modal), then we should resolve this bug as WONTFIX.

It's not 100% clear to me what you think "modeless" means here, but I will try to explain anyway... For alert/prompt/confirm, the spec requires that the dialog is modal (and in fact, the dialogs being tab-modal means we break the spec in some edgecases, which is its own issue...). For networking things like the http auth dialog, we could conceivably make it non-modal, but as Johann suggested, doing that is not a trivial problem. In fact, to the degree that it requires the calling code to use event loop spinning etc., it is no easier to do than making them tab-modal (which also requires such event loop spinning). So no, I'm not convinced that there's some kind of "easier" solution here that involves making the dialogs modeless...

Comment 6

[Marco Castelluccio [:marco]]

(In reply to :Gijs (slow, PTO recovery mode) from comment #5)
> (In reply to Marco Castelluccio [:marco] from comment #4)
> > This is not a duplicate of bug 616843. Bug 616843 is suggesting to make
> > dialogs tab-modal, this bug is suggesting to make them modeless.
> > If we don't intend to do what suggested in comment 0 (make all dialogs non
> > modal), then we should resolve this bug as WONTFIX.
> 
> It's not 100% clear to me what you think "modeless" means here, but I will
> try to explain anyway... For alert/prompt/confirm, the spec requires that
> the dialog is modal (and in fact, the dialogs being tab-modal means we break
> the spec in some edgecases, which is its own issue...). For networking
> things like the http auth dialog, we could conceivably make it non-modal,
> but as Johann suggested, doing that is not a trivial problem. In fact, to
> the degree that it requires the calling code to use event loop spinning
> etc., it is no easier to do than making them tab-modal (which also requires
> such event loop spinning). So no, I'm not convinced that there's some kind
> of "easier" solution here that involves making the dialogs modeless...

Yeah, I know there would be problems with spec and UX, but the benefit would have outweighted the drawbacks in my opinion.
Anyway, I was assuming it would be easier. Since it isn't, then there's no point in considering this further.