286400 - Alert box blocks access to menus

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 61098

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[TuringT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050221 Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu) (Ubuntu package 1.0+dfsg.1-6ubuntu1)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050221 Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu) (Ubuntu package 1.0+dfsg.1-6ubuntu1)

Javascript alert boxes are modal, i.e. they totally block access to the window
that launched them. This allows a malicious web page to take control of your
browser and may force you to kill Firefox, thus losing all your tabs and current
session. 

To see why this is a serious problem, visit
http://www.funnyjunk.com/pages/awesome.htm for an example. Your window will work
again only after closing 200+ alerts. There is a workaround if you happen to
have another previously open window - then you cand disable javascript from the
other window. Otherwise, Firefox virtually hangs.

A possible solution would be using the new yellow 'notification bar' for all
javascript alerts. This would solve all annoyances related to alertbox blocking
the user workflow.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a page that shows a javascript alert, like
http://www.funnyjunk.com/pages/awesome.htm
2. Try to use the browser without closing the alert first.

Actual Results:  
It's impossible to use the window in which the alert appeared until you close
all the alerts.

Expected Results:  
Alert boxes should include a button labelled "Don't show me more alerts from
this page" that disabled javascript in the current tab. Also the menus and other
tabs should be usable with the mouse instead of blocked.

Comment 1

[Ben Fowler]

I agree. In Bug 286095 "Alert window: "https is not a registered protocol", 
freezes browser window.", I suggest that there there are many ways that malicious
sites can do this. Firefox should hobble all of them!

Comment 2

[TuringT]

Sorry, I'm playing with the Steps to Reproduce and I've found that the browser
is not totally frozen, it's still accesible from keyboard. 

But it still is a major problem for heavy mouse users like me (I didn't
discovered this until reporting the bug). So I'm downgrading the severity from
Critical to Major.

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 61098 ***