Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Alert dialogs
Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 6 threads.
People raised many different problems with Alert dialogs, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 6 complaints
- Cannot reliably pick a non-default alert button from the keyboard; shortcuts work only sometimes2025-02-02
- Users miss pop-ups that open on a different screen from their window2023-05-24
- Infinite alert loops make the page impossible to exit, since dismissing one immediately retriggers it2021-08-26
- Alert and basic auth popups steal focus from what the user is doing2021-08-04
- Modal dialog blocks the entire browser until dismissed, a poor interaction design2014-04-16
- Notification sits in the corner, needs zooming to read; boxes vanish or move mid-read2013-02-26