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Modal dialogs are disgusting.

Dragmire, would you like to expand on that? Sure, modals should not be used everywhere, but they definitely have a place - which would explain their addition to the HTML5 spec

It restricts the flow of web interaction. Control the user's direction through obvious stepping, not through restriction of navigation.

Others have said it better:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9705a.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/us-cranky12.html

edit: I mean, here we are in 2008 with these wonderful multi-tab browsers and hundreds of ways of communicating over the web, but we're still restricting a user to interacting with a single window before moving on? What if the window you open up requires information that's in my web-based e-mail, or an IM I received over the web? Am I then forced to go open up another window, or close yours just to go write down the information you want?

Like any tool (Ajax comes to mind as the primary offender), they can be used very well and they can be used very poorly. You can't claim the tool sucks just because some people choose to bastardize its use.

Death to Modal Dialogs!!!

"Just because you can do it, doesn't mean that you should."

I'd agree with Rob - any tool can be used well, or badly. We use modal dialogs as part of a precisely defined workflow, where are user has to step through a number of pages, one after the other. For this they are very useful. We also design our pages so as to provide whatever information the person may require, or links to it. So, we do it right, others may do it wrong - it's all about how you use a tool.

We've also found that using modal dialogs for editing or creating new records greatly clarifies the page flow. From a page that lists, for example, your customers, you can either link to another page to create/edit a customer, submit that, and transition back to the list page (a very common operation), or you can pop up a modal dialog, have the user submit the information, close the modal, and refresh the parent page for listing the customers. We've found through user usability testing that users find it much more intuitive using the modal dialogs, and also find it much easier to follow the context of the page flow.

So, I'm not saying they're for everyone, but they work for us, and all of our customers love them. However, we still provide the option for each user to turn them of, so everyone wins :-)

Good to know, although I've never had a reason compelling enough to inflict a modal dialog box on the user, in particular if it really locks the whole browser down. Pity for the 'fanboy', which deserves the vote down.

"Pity for the fanboy"? But I'm a fanboy :-)

Fanboys can be so touchy....