Helpful Dialogs

I’ve recently started using the web based GTalk that’s available through Gmail. It’s pretty handy for quick little things. Occasionally I’ll even “pop-out” one of the chat boxes into it’s own window, for a longer conversation.

That’s when trouble starts…

I’m not accustom to having chat tied to a browser window or to leaving my email open all the time. As a result, I routinely load a new web page over the main Gmail page, Accidentally closing all the popped-out chat windows.

Gmail notifies me of this:

That’s sorta nice. Without it, I may have spent some time trying to figure out where my window went*. It’s only information though. Now that I know there’s been a mistake, I need a way to quickly act on it.

My only option is to say “OK”, close the window, re-load Gmail, then start the chat again. That’s incredibly frustrating. Especially when it’s possible to offer a cancelation option using Javascript’s onbeforeunload.

Blogger uses this event to displays the following dialog when you close a page with unsaved changes:

It’s a little wordy. That’s Firefox’s fault. To cut down on malicious usage, only the middle line is editable by the page creator. None the less, now I have the opportunity to fix a potential mistake.

Of course, there’s a chance it isn’t a mistake. That’s happened to me many times on Blogger (I wanted to discard the changes – closing the window is the easiest option). Yet it’s never bothered me thanks to one simple reason: The dialog is helpful more often than not.

^{* Multiple web browser windows that are dependent on each other? Who knew??}