Override window.alert

By  on  

For years the only bit of feedback web developers could get was via alert("{str}") calls. These days we have the web console but, in rare cases, we don't have a console and alert calls are our only window into a value at a given time.

One problem: if an alert sneaks into production code, your site looks like it's been hacked. Your site looks like it's malware! To prevent any of those issues, you can add this snippet to your production build:

window.alert = console.log

This tiny line of JavaScript could save your site from catastrophe. There are many cases for overriding native functionality and this is a great example!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools HTML Police: dwMarkupMarine

    We've all inherited rubbish websites from webmasters that couldn't master valid HTML. You know the horrid markup: paragraph tags with align attributes and body tags with background attributes. It's almost a sin what they do. That's where dwMarkupMarine comes in.

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using Dojo

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with Dojo JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

Discussion

  1. jonathan santos

    it’s an interesting idea, and I’m not saying the world is perfect, but if instead of using this to avoid pushing debug code onto production, how would I go about testing for stuff like alerts and other weird edge cases

  2. Mr P

    In older IE browsers the browser will crash if console.log is called when the debug window is closed. Will this work then?

  3. dev

    override window.alert in IE for logggint using $.ajax to call WebService or REST API ?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!