We are retiring our popup windows

From this afternoon, you will notice that we have 'retired' many of the popup windows that are used to add or modify entries in the system (such as calendar entries, contacts, receipts, payments and contact history).  Previously, clicking to add or modify an entry caused a new browser window to load.

For a number of reasons, using new browser windows has been less and less popular, mainly due to performance reasons and so we have swapped the browser window popups for shiny new AJAX modal popups.  If you're interested, you can see a simple example of a modal popup in the asp.net AJAX toolkit here (we've actually modified a lot of Microsoft's code for optimised loading in BIO).

So why did we make the change?  A number of reasons...

1. Some browser toolbars were preventing the new window popups from loading. Popup blockers that are inherent in many browser toolbars sometimes get overzealous and even block popups that have been loaded via intentional user interaction with the page.
2. Loading a new browser window is slower than loading a modal popup.  We are constantly seeking performance improvements and AJAX-enabled modal popups load a lot quicker than new browser windows.
3. Saving a modal popup does not require a full parent page refresh. On saving data in the new browser window, the parent page, containing the data to be modified required a full page refresh. Now, with a modal popup, we are able to insert the new or modified data into the parent page without refreshing the entire page but just a smaller panel within it, thus removing the 'clunky' feeling of a full page refresh (and reducing bandwidth usage).

So, are there any downsides?

The only disadvantage of using modal popups is that you can't now add or modify entries while looking at a different background page.  For instance, entering a new contact entry by copying the data from an Outlook page behind is no longer possible. But why not try our new import feature to grab all of your Outlook data into BIO at once...?

Some popup browser windows still remain in lower impact areas and these will be phased out over the coming months.

Sign up or Log in and check out the new modal popups now...