> as a developer it's good practice to test against early release channels of major browsers to learn about any compatibility issues upfront
This is a rather alarming viewpoint which I think highlights Chrome's quest to become the One True Implementation of web standards. In addition to the major browser vendors I'm now supposed to be testing against beta and nightly builds in order to ensure that my website is not going to break because Google decided to eliminate something? Yikes.
This assumption that behind every website is a team of developers maintaining it for its entire lifecycle is a stubborn and elitist Google fantasy.
On the other hand, I'm seriously worried that Google is using its position to force large changes to the web.
Heck, if they did that it might come back into style. Pop-up notifications are a pain to implement from scratch
event loop, but the _whole point_ of Alert is being MODAL and BLOCKING. If I didnt care about that I would just pop fixed position div. Its meant to pause whole page, thats its designed role.
I seem to remember browsers (Netscape or Opera?) around 1999 having "Never show this dialog again" checkboxes meant to prevent alert() spam.
https://twitter.com/estark37/status/1422694845076762629?s=21
Everything else is speculation. It may even be likely speculation! But it is speculation nonetheless.
It is not speculation to say "Google is considering removing alert()". Multiple engineers from Chrome have confirmed on Twitter that they have an eventual goal of removing alert() at some point in the future (or making it non-blocking and removing prompt/confirm, which is the same thing). See https://twitr.gq/domenic/status/1422647331804037120 as one example.
Maybe it won't happen! There's a lot of time for feedback. But it is accurate to say that Google is considering it.
Also as a small sidenote, they are not considering removing alert() for cross-origin iframes. They are removing it for cross-origin iframes and have very temporarily walked the changes back in order to give devs more time to prepare. Short of some kind of massive blowback that forces the devs to change their mind, Chrome's decision to remove alert() from cross-origin iframes has already been finalized.
I still don't even fully understand the problem, because everyone just defaults to linking a bug tracker that's of lower quality than a Reddit discussion, and I can't trust HN comments to explain it because of all the outrage and assumption-by-framing. Ugh.
