Window.alert is a native function built into Firefox – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be overridden.

Check this out:

Open Firebug, and get to the console.  Then, click that little red arrow at the end of the input line so that you get the large box input on the right side of the screen.

Type this into the input box:

var alert_count = 0;
var old_alert = window.alert;
var alert_max = 5;
window.alert = function(alert_text) {
  if (alert_count < alert_max) {
    ++alert_count;
    old_alert(alert_text);
  } else {
    console.log("Reached maximum alerts");
  }
}

Now, hit “Run” at the bottom of that input window.  We’ve just overridden the window.alert function during runtime.

Hit “Clear” at the bottom of the input window, and type in:

for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
  alert(i);
}

Hit “Run”.  Click “OK” for the first 5 alert windows, and watch as the rest of them are spewed out to the console.  Nice.

So, I don’t think this helps me much in creating my plug-in, but it’s interesting to see how window.alert is malliable at run-time.

This seems to be a more relevant discovery – Mozilla’s Chrome lets me create an alert popup with a checkbox using alertCheck.  I think this is exactly what I’m looking for.

I’ll tinker with it over the next few days, and post some code.