The Chrome team are a bunch of entitled jerks. They keep doing these things completely tone deaf and disconnected from the rest of the world. Unfortunately this seems to be fairly common with large software vendors in general, as soon as they have a captive audience they immediately turn hostile.

It's a random Twitter thread where it's not even clear if they talk about alert() in general, or iframe alerts.

It's not a random twitter thread. That's one of Chrome's main standards-writing people. And he explicitly talks about the removal of these entirely.

There's more in Intent to Remove: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/hTOXi...

--- start quote, emphasis mine ---

We’re on a long, slow path to deprecate and remove window.alert/confirm/prompt and beforeunload handlers due to their role in user-hostile event loop pausing, as well as phishing and other abuse mechanisms. We’ve been successfully chipping away at them in various cases, e.g. background tabs, subframes with no user interaction, and now cross-origin subframes. Each step is hard-fought progress toward the eventual goal

--- end quote ---

Thanks for this!

It ought to be a lot easier than this detective-work to discover this plan. Like, we should probably all know about it, and stop using these user-agent modals now working to replace all use of them?

(rails-ujs, for instance, still uses window.confirm for opt-in "are you sure" on form submissions. not sure what a good replacement is honestly. This is something I would hope to see people discussing and figuring out...)

Still, just a bunch of Google Devrels that decided out of the blue to break the web, because... well, they can.

Exactly that. It is amazing that a bunch of isolated developers has the ability to inflict such damage on the web by breaking backwards compatibility.

okay, that’s actually a useful source, thanks.

oh wow. that's gonna break a LOT of things. I hope they agreed the value of that removal has to be very high for that level of breakage, and decided it was... if decision-makers just don't care about breakage anymore, that would be disturbing.