4 ms·

When someone tries to navigate away they wanted to stop them. A real world analogue would be if I tried to leave a store and someone blocked my way to try and m

• evan_ 5y ago
  But assuming it’s just a div that appears when you mouse off at the top, it doesn’t actually do anything to stop them. It’s not outrageous for a shopkeeper to say “don’t go!” or something like that as you’re leaving. It’s annoying and tacky but it’s not analogous to being held hostage.
  • nickthegreek 5y ago
    In the olden days, a website could pop up a dialog box that would lock browser interaction til it was dealt with. It was abused. A lot. This was way prior to 2012 tho.
  • addaon 5y ago
    2012. A modal dialog was probably a javascript alert(), which at the time was model for the whole browser and would prevent navigation until dismissed.
    • gruez 5y ago
      I just tested with an older version of firefox (10.0, released January 31, 2012), and it had non-modal alert() dialogs.
  • menzoic 5y ago
    You've never seen this? When someone clicks to close a browser tab you can stop the tab from closing by adding a handler to the onbeforeunload() event.
    • gruez 5y ago
      And that can be bypassed by closing the tab again.
      • lazide 5y ago
        Yup, pretty terrible.
• gruez 5y ago
  >A real world analogue would be if I tried to leave a store and someone blocked my way to try and make me buy something. That'd depend on the implementation behavior. If it's using window.onbeforeunload, yeah I guess it's kind of like someone blocking you when you try to leave, although you can easily walk around them (on most browsers if you try to close the tab and the modal shows up, and you try to close the tab again it will override the modal). However, there's also another type where it tracks the location of your cursor, and shows a popup when it leaves the content area (indicating that your mouse is going to close the tab or go back). In that case it's not really blocking anything, and much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door.
  • lazide 5y ago
    Either of these behaviors is equivalent to someone standing in front of the door and trying to harass me when I leave. Which is a solid ‘no thanks, not coming here again’ from me.
  • marssaxman 5y ago
    > much more analogous to a salesperson saying "before you go" as you're walking out the door. I would try to avoid going back to that store.
    • zestyping 5y ago
      I would never go back to that store and I would tell my friends not to shop there.
• adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  While I agree, do remember that some patterns can and do extend to the physical. Many stores do indeed make it hard to leave without buying, for example by having no direct route to the exit: you have to squeeze through the tills awkwardly. It's probably in the name of loss prevention, but it's also a disincentive to leave without a purchase. Actually, nearly everything about a supermarket is carefully designed for extracting money from you, from product placement, to layout, need to have a loyalty card to access discounts, even perhaps having discounts in the first place (as opposed to selling at a lower regular price), multipacks driving food and packaging waste, etc etc etc.
• itronitron 5y ago
  Best Buy used to do something similar in their retail stores to paying customers. A bouncer at the exit would usually stop people and check receipts against the merchandise they were leaving with. It's a great way for a company to show that it has no trust for its customers and that it hopes they don't come back.