Chrome removes Backspace to go back • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#171

Post by fixermark » Thu, May 19, 2016, 3:49 PM UTC

Captain_Usher wrote: post #99

dandare wrote: post #38

"We have UseCounters showing that 0.04% of page views navigate back via the backspace button and 0.005% of page views are after a form interaction. The latter are often cases where the user loses data. Years of user complaints have been enough that we think it's the right choice to change this given the degree of pain users feel by losing their data and because every platform has another keyboard combination that nav…

I'm shocked they reacted to the complaints at all. Chrome is infamous for painful UX blunders that Google refuses to acknowledge, let alone fix. Mouse thumb buttons are permanently bound to forward and back, the only workaround is to use your mouse's driver or a third-party input mapper to bind them to something else. The Android version cannot re-order tabs (or use extensions. Seriously.) The Google product forums a…

Probably performance. So yes, do go check out FF again. ;)

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#172

Post by DCoder » Thu, May 19, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #28

anotheryou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The change in context is not clear enough for the average user (Text Field or History) and the consequences are really bad (loss of input text).

Does Chrome not prompt you about losing un-submitted changes to a form when triggering a navigation event?

It does not, but the page author can use javascript to generate a confirmation dialog when you're leaving the page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEvent...

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#173

Post by fixermark » Thu, May 19, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

stephenr wrote: post #110

kijin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use a browser that will warn you about losing un-submitted form contents before navigating away? Most browsers don't do this. If you see a warning like that, it's usually triggered by javascript on the web page itself.

Safari added protection for 'unsaved forms' when closing a window/tab in v3, which was released about 9 years ago.

Great. I'll get right on installing Safari on my Ubuntu machine.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#174

Post by Daneel_ » Thu, May 19, 2016, 3:54 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #74

douche wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's infuriating trying to highlight anything in Outlook. Oh, you're dragging to select part of a word, or a huge long URI? Let me go ahead and automatically expand your selection to cover the entire token, with the trailing whitespace. Haha, you're trying to circumvent my helpfulness by setting the cursor and shift-right-arrowing? Haha, no soup for you! Break down and copy it into notepad instead!

> with the trailing whitespace. Worst feature EVER. I can't begin count how many times I've had the following talk with users: user: My password doesn't work me: Did you copy it from Outlook?

Disable 'smart paragraph selection' and 'automatically select entire word' in the edit options. I turn these off instantly in Word every time I have to reinstall them.

Problem solved.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#175

Post by shabble » Thu, May 19, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #89

cptskippy wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backspace and Escape have always had different behavior contextually. In videogames the Escape key is almost always "back".

Incidentally, Esc used to stop GIFs on a web page. Doesn't seem to do that (anymore?) in Chrome. (Oh, or Firefox, or Edge. IE is the only browser that still does that.)

IIRC there was some tedious justification for firefox about this being 'more correct' since escape would close websocket connections and pause javascripts and other fancy modern cruft sites rely on.

There's an extension (SuperStop I believe?) that partly restores it if you shift-esc, but recently I've found that invasive keybindings in pages (Slack, I think?) can intercept this and stop it working.

I'd really like a whitelist somewhere of what keys/combos I'd like the page to be able to catch, vs those which I expect and rely on to perform native functions, and which shouldn't be hookable (Github trying to cleverly intercept '/' and take you to the search field would be great, if / wasn't already a shortcut for searching the page, etc.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#176

Post by fixermark » Thu, May 19, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

qb45 wrote: post #144

IvanK_net wrote: post #117

I wanted to use Ctrl+N, Ctrl+O and Ctrl+T shortcuts in my webapp. I reported a bug 3 years ago https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=321810 which is not fixed yet, but they have "fixed" Backspace ... that seems crazy to me.

And what's next to override, the power button? I wholly agree with this WONTFIX.

It makes it quite difficult to write a terminal emulator web app.

Chrome, at least, can resolve this issue by bundling up your web app as a Chrome app; apps launched from the Chrome App Store can launch into a context where the standard Chrome modifier keys aren't mapped.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#177

Post by 83457 » Thu, May 19, 2016, 4:00 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #20

This is going to sound hyperbolic, I'm sure, but backspace-as-back is enormously important to my browsing experience. When I recently installed Ubuntu I had a small moment of panic when I realized that hitting backspace in Firefox performed some Ubuntu-specific thing rather than navigating backwards (as it does in Windows), but fortunately there's an about:config pref to re-enable the behavior. Just my two cents.

I went through literally the same moment of dread as you a month ago when I installed ubuntu and realized backspace didn't go back in firefox... then I installed chrome and all was well. Might sound odd but I probably would have stuck with firefox on ubuntu longer just if that had been the default. I use escape and backspace keys regularly without even thinking about them until they don't do what I expect.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#178

Post by eco » Thu, May 19, 2016, 4:03 PM UTC

ChrisArgyle wrote: post #5

Analysis from Chrome devs here https://codereview.chromium.org/1854963002 Though I am a frequent user of backspace in Chrome I'm inclined to agree with their decision. Almost no one is using it and casual users are confused by it. I'll just wait for someone to implement the feature in an extension.

I use Backspace back quite a bit myself and was confused when it stopped working but I think it's the right decision to remove it. I'll just switch to Alt-Left rather than switch to an extension (and endure the week or two of annoyance while I adapt).

I actually use Page-Down instead of space which I suspect makes me weird but I feel like Space should be next on the hit-list as long as they are cleaning up confusing shortcuts.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#179

Post by lr » Thu, May 19, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

On OS X, Command-left bracket has worked on Chrome, Safari, Firefox (and probably more) for years. Not sure about Windows or Linux, but keyboard shortcuts are very well established across browsers in this way (like Command-L, and all of the Emacs bindings like Control-A, Control-E, etc.).

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#180

Post by Kiro » Thu, May 19, 2016, 4:10 PM UTC

As someone who constantly gets screwed by this: finally!

Example from literally one minute ago: a cool thing was going on in a Twitch stream and I wanted to hype in the chat, misclicked the chat box so backspace went back to the stream list instead making me miss the moment.