I think this is one of many problems that would go away if window managers simply provided tabs as first-class objects. I am tired of every app having to "support" tabs, and inevitably see quirky behavior.<p>Not only would this fix alert problems, but we'd gain a lot of other capabilities. The biggest one for me would be, inter-application tabs: why shouldn't my tab stack be able to alternate between mail, terminals, editors and web browsers, for instance?
This issue was actually central to my switch to Chrome.<p>I'm glad it's finally fixed, but when something this important to UI takes over 10 years to get resolved, perhaps the Firefox team needs to just choose a fix (such as the ones suggested in that thread from 2002-2005) and fix any issues it causes in further releases.
Really annoying when it happens, although I've always found it possible to click ok in the alert box, and hammer ctrl+w(to close the tab) and it usually works. Sometimes it takes a bunch of ok->ctrl+w combinations before it takes, but it works. Good with a real fix for it though.<p>I just hope it will make the basic auth username/password-boxes tab-modal as well.
It would be nice if they made it easier to disable all alerts (it is possible, but takes a bit of reading to work out). In general I hate their use.<p>10 years is too long though for a simple thing like this.