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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#21

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

gjvc wrote: post #14
spo81rty wrote: post #8

This has always been annoying when doing it on accident. Good riddance!

Chrome remembers form contents upon navigating back to a form page.

Not everyone really understands the concept of forward/back. In my experience, back is fairly well understood, but forward is a bit trickier. I guess a number of people, having accidentally gone back, either don't understand that forward will 'undo' their mistake, or just don't understand they've even gone back. That number, and the negative result, probably outweighs the number of people who will be annoyed by this change, especially since - as many point out - there are many alternatives to the backspace shortcut.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#22

Post by jamespo »

rayiner wrote: post #13
gjvc wrote: post #2

This is most annoying. I have used this for the past twenty years and have not lost form data using it. In any event, chrome seems to remember form contents upon navigating back to a form page. Leave my muscle memory alone please.

I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month. Glad to see it go. It's the worst kind of UI modality because it does different things depending on whether you've reached the beginning of the form. I like to mash backspace to clear out a form. Imagine if pressing "CTRL-S" saved if there were edits, but deleted your file if you'd already saved. People who mash "CTRL-S" habitually would be screwed.…

Well apart from the millions of desktop PCs out there.

One thing I like about my venerable x220 is the dedicated forward & backward keys that can also be used to switch buffers in emacs etc.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#23

Post by jhildings »

rayiner wrote: post #13
gjvc wrote: post #2

This is most annoying. I have used this for the past twenty years and have not lost form data using it. In any event, chrome seems to remember form contents upon navigating back to a form page. Leave my muscle memory alone please.

I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month. Glad to see it go. It's the worst kind of UI modality because it does different things depending on whether you've reached the beginning of the form. I like to mash backspace to clear out a form. Imagine if pressing "CTRL-S" saved if there were edits, but deleted your file if you'd already saved. People who mash "CTRL-S" habitually would be screwed.…

once a month is not that much...

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#24

Post by crazygringo »

Finally! It's about time. I don't know who ever thought having a command that didn't use a modifier key was a good idea -- it's not just about losing form data (even if that's protected against), a webpage can have all sorts of "state" you don't want to lose.

Also, what's so hard with tapping Cmd+Left or Ctrl+Left to go back? It's all I've ever done, incredibly intuitive, and simply to do with one hand (using the right Cmd button), at least on most keyboards I've seen.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#25

Post by Jedd »

Chrome / Chromium have a habit of making these arbitrary changes that seriously annoy some (arguably small) percentage of their users, while claiming that it makes it simpler / better for everyone else, while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.

Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.

I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.

1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and

2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.

No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#26

Post by davb »

They say 0.04% of page views are a result of pressing backspace. 0.04% sounds small but imagine how many page views per month there are, globally, with Chrome. That's. Significant number.

Backspace sure is an unusual navigation choice these days, and perhaps wouldn't make sense to code in new software. But in browsers, backspace to navigate back is expect behaviour.

This isn't the first time the Chrome or Chromium teams have made sweeping changes based on usage stats, pissing off the minority who use those features and pushing ever closer to a browser with only the lowest common denominator features that everyone uses.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#27

Post by guard-of-terra »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #6

One of the contributors states: "Building an extension for this should be very simple." Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level? Surely it would remove a lot of unnecessary duplicate code.

"Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level?"

There is one, on KDE level. Any KDE app has generic-looking hotkey remapper under settings menu. It just works.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#28

Post by stephenr »

anotheryou wrote: post #16
ruipgil wrote: post #10

I might be the minority here, but I think that using the backspace to go back is counter intuitive. In my mind backspace is to delete something, and I always worry about that.

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?

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#29

Post by FollowSteph3 »

I think this is very good. I can't tell you the number of times I've lost form data by hitting backspace.

For those wondering how, if you do control backspace to erase a word etc igs very easy to miss, especially as you transition between word delete and single character delete.

The other common use case for errors is when u think you're in a field editing and you're actually not, bam, you just lost all your form data.

I also like the idea that backspace is for text editing and not for a second feature such as navigation. For enter yes but not backspace

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#30

Post by [deleted] »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #6

One of the contributors states: "Building an extension for this should be very simple." Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level? Surely it would remove a lot of unnecessary duplicate code.

[deleted]
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