The red background in the text field is the warning that you’re about to overwrite something…
But yeah, a dialog box prompt would be far more effective than this…
Also far more annoying.
I think the concern is reasonable a bug and a usability issue can be confusing for users and to just dismiss it might lead to more fraustration.
While I understand the need to manage the bug tracker from developers pov but I think they should aslo take into consideration the usability issues and maybe add new tag/category or advise the Community to take them somewhere else just like it happens with feature requests.
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It’s easy to miss that red background, a dialog box isn’t, so… 
But it could be optional ofc…
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How can you possibly miss a huge splash of fire-engine red right across the screen?
It happens a lot when you’re importing/exporting stuff real quick by double clicking… No time to look down there…
Never happened to you? I’ve lost several blend files this way lol…
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imho we should follow the standard platform specific file dialog behavior, for instance on windows when you save over a file, it pops up with a confirmation dialog, users are used to it, they have the muscle memory to quickly recognize what it is and deal with the situation. (I’m not sure how other platforms do it)
Blender can do ‘blender things’ all it wants with new concepts that don’t exist in other software
but if every piece of software on a platform pops up a dialog and blender goes, look we gave the filename box a red color i don’t think we’re doing it right.
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Honestly no, not that I can recall.
What you mean to say is they never read the dialog and it just becomes muscle memory, which entirely obviates its purpose.
One of the things I absolutely adore about Blender is that it doesn’t try to second-guess you. I hate, hate, HAAAAAATE those confirmation dialogs everywhere. This talk of making it do exactly that is deeply uncomfortable for me.
I brought up this exact issue with the UI guys a few weeks ago, @William had the following to say on the subject, and i’m kinda have to agree with him here, we should take better care of the users data, even though it will add 175ms of annoyance to power users like you.
(Given chat only saves the logs for an month or so, and direct links to chat rarely work, i’ll embed the relevant text for future readers)
Either way we’re getting awfully off topic here, can a mod split this discussion off?
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That’s probably a new thing. Wasn’t around when I reported it
If user data is sacred they should find a way to not delete caches if the user looks at them from a wrong angle.
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Not sure if this is finally fixed in 2.8x but it used to be in 2.79 "nice texture you just painted, oh, you hit save? well you didn’t click the magic F button behind the texture name, soo… well… it wasn’t used, so I tossed it! you’re not gonna find out until next time you open this file though… kthxbye!’
that was always a super good time… save = delete is about the most backwards thing blender has ever done
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Yup. This kind of confirms I hate pretty much all of William’s decisions. If you really can’t be trusted to know what and where to write, there are filesystem level solutions that will fill that need. The right tool for the right job.
I’ll happily disagree with you there, if every single app on the platform protects the user from overwriting a file (as the default file dialog does on windows, but for ‘reasons’ we’re not using that dialog), you can’t just take the training wheels off in blender just to please the odd power user.
Don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying you can’t have it your way, if there was a checkbox in user prefs to bypass it that be fine with me, but by default it should protect the user from doing bad things to his data.
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That’s the role of the filesystem. This is why we have things like file history on windows and rsnapshot on linux. Apps shouldn’t be concerned with this in the first place. It’s downright archaic to try to deal with this at the app level. Blender shouldn’t be so backward-thinking.
Are you making the case the default File dialog on windows should stop warning about overwriting a file cause volume snapshots and file history are a thing now?
Yes, absolutely. Making sure the user really means it should be a thing of the past wherever feasible since we now have enough storage and processing power to just be able to restore old versions on demand.
Perhaps there should be a preference setting titled no confirmations. Users who pick it will see Blender close instantly on pressing X, not show any kind of warning when they might overwrite a file, not be asked to save when doing file > open, ect…
People who want the old-school Blender experience can then set their selection mode to right-click and risk losing their work with an accidental click or keypress 
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Manually saving in general can be seen as a thing of the past. See the Canon CAT in the 80s which got rid of manual saving, which was later carried over to modern platforms such as smartphones, which (like objects in the real world) typically don’t require explicit saving. Combined with persistent undo and powerful versioning, this can work well.
But, as long as we do have manual saving, it should not be too easy to accidentally overwrite user data.
Though note we already have a preference to disable the save prompt.
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Well, as long as it’s an option, no skin off my back.