Intent to unship: window.showModalDialog

[Blake Kaplan]

Hey all,

3 years ago (!) sicking commented in bug 981796 [1] that we were removing
window.showModalDialog. The following year, I wrote a patch to disable it via
a pref at the same time as pushing some telemetry to try to track usage. We
saw more usage than we were hoping, so we held off on turning it off then.
That being said, we didn't implement window.showModalDialog in e10s, so it's
been disabled for those users since (about) Firefox 48.

It's time to turn off window.showModalDialog for the rest of the users. For
the time being, we'll hide it behind a pref and look to remove the code in the
next couple of cycles.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=981796
--
Blake Kaplan

[jm.ac...@gmail.com]

In one of my projects we have replaced this method with the <dialog> tag that only supports Google Chrome.
It would be interesting that when window.showModalDialog is turned off, the dialog element is operational.

When do you want to implement the dialog tag html5?

Thanks.

[Mike Taylor]

On 6/7/17 5:23 PM, Blake Kaplan wrote:
> 3 years ago (!) sicking commented in bug 981796 [1] that we were removing
> window.showModalDialog. The following year, I wrote a patch to disable it via
> a pref at the same time as pushing some telemetry to try to track usage. We
> saw more usage than we were hoping, so we held off on turning it off then.
> That being said, we didn't implement window.showModalDialog in e10s, so it's
> been disabled for those users since (about) Firefox 48.

+1.

AFAIK, the only (known) fallout from e10s not having this is image
attachments failing for older versions of Outlook Web Access -- which
brought us inline with other browsers.

(It will be interesting to see if non-e10s users file bugs once its gone.)

--
Mike Taylor
Web Compat, Mozilla

[Ehsan Akhgari]

There was some recent activity around this in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=840640. Tim, what's the
latest status on this? Are you still working on it?

On 06/08/2017 09:08 AM, Mike Taylor wrote:
> On 6/7/17 5:23 PM, Blake Kaplan wrote:

>> 3 years ago (!) sicking commented in bug 981796 [1] that we were removing
>> window.showModalDialog. The following year, I wrote a patch to disable it via
>> a pref at the same time as pushing some telemetry to try to track usage. We
>> saw more usage than we were hoping, so we held off on turning it off then.
>> That being said, we didn't implement window.showModalDialog in e10s, so it's
>> been disabled for those users since (about) Firefox 48.