Question

Are you able to halt JavaScript execution without locking up the browser? The way you would normally halt execution is to do an infinite while()-loop, but in the case of FireFox, it locks up the browser until the loop has ended.

What’s your take on this?

I am trying to override window.confirm() to implement my own dialog using HTML. I am doing this so I don’t have to change existing code (it’s a pretty big code-base).

I need to be able to halt execution to allow user-input; to in turn return a boolean like the standard confirm function does:

if (confirm("..."))
{
    // user pressed "OK"
}
else
{
    // user pressed "Cancel"
}

Update

To my knowledge; this cannot be done using setTimeout() or setInterval() since these functions execute the code thats given to them asynchronously.

Answer 1

confirm() prompt() and alert() are special functions–they call out of the JavaScript sandbox into the browser, and the browser suspends JavaScript execution. You can’t do the same thing, since you need to build your functionality into JavaScript.

I don’t think there’s a great way to drop in a replacement without doing some restructuring along the lines of:

myconfirmfunction(function() {
   /* OK callback */
}, function() {
   /* cancel callback */
});