Reputation: 36064
What are situation when you want to use window.showModalDialog function? It seams that you can do exactly the same with window.open function and few parameters that remove some of the chrome (navigation, addressbar, etc...)
When would you want to use window.showModalDialog and window.open?
Upvotes: 12
Views: 32469
Reputation: 1817
Note that while you can show modal from any popup window, you cannot use window.open from a model dialog in some browsers (IE, Safari).
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 12704
It has been a few years since this question was originally asked and things have changed a bit since then. window.showModalDialog
is now officially standardized as part of HTML5 and is supported in IE, Firefox 3+, Chrome (albeit buggy), and Safari 5.1+.
Unfortunately window.showModalDialog
is still plagued by a number of issues.
window.showModalDialog
.Therefore it's still not a good idea to use window.showModalDialog
. If you need the window opened to be modal (i.e. the user cannot interact with the rest of the page until they deal with the dialog) I would suggest using jQuery UI's dialog plugin.
window.open
will work for non modal windows but I would stick with jQuery UI's dialog because opening new windows tends to annoy users.
If you're interested I write about this in more detail on my blog - http://tjvantoll.com/2012/05/02/showmodaldialog-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-never-use-it/.
Upvotes: 19
Reputation: 41
showModalDialog()
works well in Internet Explorer, Firefox (3 and above)
Works in Chrome but popup is not model (you can go to parent window)
Upvotes: 0
Reputation: 41
showModalDialog()
is currently being standardized as part of HTML5. The third argument (for additional options) is not present in the HTML5 version, and is (safely) ignored by Safari and Chrome.
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec//user-prompts.html#dialogs-implemented-using-separate-documents
Upvotes: 4
Reputation: 1614
Note that there's a bug in Chrome 2 which prevents showModalDialog() from loading properly. The popup window appears, but the content never loads.
One more reason to avoid using showModalDialog().
Upvotes: 3
Reputation: 38366
Modal dialogs are dialogs that once opened by the parent, do not allow you to focus on the parent until the dialog is closed.
One could use a modal dialog for a login form, edit form, etc where you want to have a popup for user interaction but not allow the user to return to the window that opened the popup.
As a side note, I believe only Internet Explorer implementes window.showModalDialog
, so that kind of limits your usage of it.
Upvotes: 10