The MSIE browser supports a special window that behaves like a modal dialog but can be switched into the background. This is therefore a modeless dialog. Because it does not operate in a modal fashion, it does not lock out other activity in the browser. Having called this method to display a modeless dialog, the function returns immediately and the script that called it will continue execution. The opening window can continue to receive input if necessary, which you might find useful for opening palette windows, for example.

The result of this method call is a reference to the window object that represents the modeless dialog.

You must specify a URL value in the first argument for a document to be loaded into the window.

The second argument passes some arguments to the modeless dialog in the same way as you might to a modal dialog.

A third optional argument can be specified in a similar way to the feature list of a window.showModalDialog() method. However, note that the feature list is different to that for a normal window created with a window.open() method call. Refer to the window.showModalDialog() topic for details of the feature list for modal or modeless dialog windows.