11–20 of 59 posts
1. I hate, hate, hate that the backspace key is a shortcut for "back". I have never, not once hit the backspace key wanting to go back to the previous page. 2. I'll generally give the bigger players like Google some lee-way in trying out new functionality like this. It's the smaller sites that should generally stick to familiarity (except for the handful who are making a point of exploring behaviors).
But like others have posted, I have never ever hit backspace either expecting to go back to the previous page.
1. I hate, hate, hate that the backspace key is a shortcut for "back". I have never, not once hit the backspace key wanting to go back to the previous page. 2. I'll generally give the bigger players like Google some lee-way in trying out new functionality like this. It's the smaller sites that should generally stick to familiarity (except for the handful who are making a point of exploring behaviors).
1. I do it all the time. Shift-backspace happens to mean forward too. ;)
IMO backspace as a shortcut key deserves to be overridden. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally left a page while typing backspace after losing focus in a form I thought I was editing. If I were Google, I'd rather reduce the potential for negative experiences from shortcuts for my customers, most of whom I'm guessing rarely use them. Also, how are the cursor keys being overridden in a non-standard way? E…
Absolutely. That shortcut has screwed me up so many times I can't even count. I found a way to disable that function entirely in Firefox. If anyone else wants to do the same, you just change the browser.backspace_action setting on the about:config page to 2.
I suspect it's because of Google Instant (a feature I don't really like), which has to interact with the server every time a key is pressed to ensure that the results are "live". If you use the gear icon in the top-right of Google.com to go to "Search settings" and turn off Google Instant, it may fix the problem.
Google isn't the only culprit. When Gawker introduced their much-maligned redesign, their sites also rebinded arrow keys to customized interactions like Advance to Next Story. A few months on, and luckily most of these "features" have been removed. When UX interactions behave consistently at the OS and browser level across 99% of the web, why would I want to see an unpredictable custom behavior on a certain site? I h…
IMO backspace as a shortcut key deserves to be overridden. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally left a page while typing backspace after losing focus in a form I thought I was editing. If I were Google, I'd rather reduce the potential for negative experiences from shortcuts for my customers, most of whom I'm guessing rarely use them. Also, how are the cursor keys being overridden in a non-standard way? E…
If Google wants to take a stand and change the behavior of backspace, they should do it in their browser. What they should not do is implement a standard keyboard navigation at the browser level, and then override it with nonstandard actions occasionally.
Classic example is Tab ordering. When I hit Tab, I should reach the most prominent and useful field immediately (almost always a big fat search field). But too often, my first Tab lands me somewhere useless, and if I'm really unlucky it even scrolls me all the way to the bottom of the page to reveal a stupid field in a signup form from an ad or something. 5 or 6 Tabs later I may eventually reach the Search field that was in the top-left corner of the page.