There are sites out there (in the tired “Rick Roll” category) that make it hard to close a tab, by adding hooks that allow for dozens or hundreds of alert dialog boxes to appear, preventing the tab from closing. One is http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com. Don’t go to this site, unless you want to see the bug in action.

I posted a bug on bugzilla, after doing a search. I didn’t see any, but as there are hundreds of thousands of other bugs on there, I didn’t want to spend hours hunting down an exact match, so I just went ahead with it. Turns out I should have searched for “rick roll,” rather than something more specific such as “javascript alert exit loop” or similar. Ah, well, such is the folly of search engines.

So, it got merged in to another bug that’s over 7 years old. Surprisingly, it has only gathered 60 votes in that incredible period of time. I’m asking you, the loyal dpk dot net reader, to use one of your 10000 votes on this bug, and to help raise awareness of this issue, so that it might be squashed.

Looking at the code, it seems like it might involve simply adding another button to the alert dialog box, that would just kill the tab’s javascript context. But, I don’t really know how to do all that. It kinda looks like there’s different alert box code for each “platform.” I dunno. I’m no mozilla pro.