627151 - Treat window.showModalDialog like window.open

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: General, defect)

Description

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

window.showModalDialog is a rarely used feature taken from IE4 for which our support is buggy. Maintaining support for it doesn't reap much benefit, so we might as well stop trying to support it and just treat it like window.open.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Maintaining support for it doesn't reap much benefit

Do you have data on that?  We implemented it because enough sites were using it that not having support was starting to be a serious problem for adoption, no?

Also note http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/timers.html#dom-showmodaldialog

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

Out of curiosity, where's the discussion/motivation that guided the implementation? (bug? list/newsgroup?) I think my general impression is that usage of showModalDialog seems pretty uncommon at best (I've never seen it in the wild), but I wouldn't be surprised to see it used in some niche-but-important places.

The main motivation behind pondering if we can get rid of it is that (1) modal prompts are really annoying UI that we're removing from the browser in general and (2) making them tab-modal should be possible, but is extra work. I like that the spec specifically notes blocking/whitelisting; so if we need to keep support for showModalDialog in rare cases, we should look instead at making is disabled by default + UI to enable/disable it.

Comment 3

[Johnny Stenback (:jst)]

showModalDialog() was implemented in bug 194404. There were plenty of complaints about the lack of it, but how much of that is on the web vs intranet apps is unclear to me.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> where's the discussion/motivation that guided the implementation?

The existence of bug 194404 and its 7 duplicates and the fact that microsoft.com was broken without it (see bug 315795) are the obvious public info.  There were also some e-mail threads (sadly non-public), plus whatever jst was thinking at the time.

> I wouldn't be surprised to see it used in some niche-but-important places

That's the impression I get, yes.  Not used much for websites, but used for webapps, intranets, etc...

Comment 5

[Frank Yan (:fryn)]

FWIW, the microsoft.com page listed in bug 315795 that was broken no longer calls window.showModalDialog.

I wouldn't mind the default behavior of retaining the ability to return values without it being window-modal. This would reduce annoying behavior without totally breaking sites that use it. (For reference, Chromium has adopted this behavior.)