Finally! I don't know how often I accidentally navigated away from a page by pressing backspace while writing in a textbox.
Chrome removes Backspace to go back
251–260 of 594 posts
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm quite the opposite opinion and use Backspace to go back extensively, because it means that I can browse the web with one hand on my laptop with trackpoint. If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better. P.S.: Oh and if it's a crappy touchpad making unwanted inputs, then I share your concern (and probably a good time to look at other laptop keyboards; turning off the touchpad on this L…
How small are your hands if you can't one hand ALT+ Left arrow?
That's an ergonomic nightmare. The right-click->Back approach works too, but some sites like to mess with that and I must watch out to not click the wrong element, so backspace is still my go-to choice.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#253I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers." It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary. But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…
But there are better solutions. Comment #35 in that thread actually provides one: > The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss. > Your solution: Make it harder to move away. > The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents. (Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id…
I think Chrome does this as well. The real problem is that it doesn't seem to work with dynamically created forms, and web devs ruined everything with client-side templating.
But along the same lines, I would like it if browsers waited 5 seconds before actually killing a tab that you closed. That would not only fix your problem (if you applied it to page history changes as well), but solve most accidental data loss problems, and most importantly for me, be the end to having to reload entire pages just because I held down Ctrl-W for too long.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#254I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers." It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary. But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…
But there are better solutions. Comment #35 in that thread actually provides one: > The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss. > Your solution: Make it harder to move away. > The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents. (Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id…
This can be a little dicey when AJAX was used to render the form that you're thinking about submitting; for a browser to Do It Right they may need to cache complicated stuff like (a) the entire DOM and (b) the entire state of the JS interpreter at the moment navigation began away from the page. Even if we only do this on backwards navigation and immediately trash it when we navigate forwards to a new location, it still sounds to a developer's ear like a memory leak waiting to happen. It might be mitigated if you store no more than, say, 10 pages back.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#255Striking a blow for mediocrity. Ugh.
If there was really a problem with data loss, the better solution would seem to be warning the user before navigating away from the page. Removing a widely-used single-key behavior in order to protect users from themselves seems like a bad prioritization.
It'd be nice if we could still have software that is unashamedly not trying to target some sort of Archie Bunker "low information" user. Even the big Linux distros seem obsessed with making things easy for some hypothetical moron-in-a-hurry, at the expense of actual users who know what they're doing. It's unfortunate, and it seems to be a sort of antipattern that's infected a lot of software design. It wasn't always this way: there used to be an expectation that users would learn to use software, and that like any tool, if misused you could mess things up. Somewhere along the line, we've decided that it's unacceptable to tell users that they need to learn how to use software instead of blindly stabbing at it and expecting it to protect them.
I'm not against sane defaults or warning users before they really do something horrible, but the current trend towards ripping out anything and everything that might possibly be 'confusing' seems to be far overstepping the mark.
Firefox isn't much better, but at least they haven't Nerfed the back button.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#256I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers." It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary. But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…
But there are better solutions. Comment #35 in that thread actually provides one: > The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss. > Your solution: Make it harder to move away. > The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents. (Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id…
Wait until you're filling out online mortgage documents, or a security clearance application, or some other high-stakes documents. You will not like the backspace to go back function. Your adrenergic nervous system will make sure of it.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#257I can finally uninstall BackspaceMeansBackspace!
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#258I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers." It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary. But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…
But there are better solutions. Comment #35 in that thread actually provides one: > The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss. > Your solution: Make it harder to move away. > The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents. (Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id…
The web no longer consists of just static web pages and form data.
I build complex web applications, which are stateful in many ways that don't involve forms (and involve things like websocket connections, etc). There's no way that the browser could possibly recreate that state by going forward.
So web apps of any complexity must necessarily intercept the delete key and break its functionality. And to the extent that the web increasingly consists of such apps, it means that "delete to go back" has long since being a standard feature that users can count on. That's just a fact on the ground. Time to remove the expectation entirely.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#259I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers." It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary. But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…
The middle mouse button paste is one of my favorite Linux features. When I discovered that nuance, I was shocked that Microsoft never included it by default in any of the Windows systems I'd used throughout history. Having access to two separate sections of the clipboard has proven invaluable to me time and time again. The difference with that feature and the topic at hand is that, should someone in X/Wayland decide…
You can add a chrome extension easily, and have this feature indefinitely (at least, that's what the chrome devs are thinking).
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#260I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers." It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary. But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…
But there are better solutions. Comment #35 in that thread actually provides one: > The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss. > Your solution: Make it harder to move away. > The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents. (Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id…
> > The correct solution: Cache tab history completely [...]
This is not a solution for the majority of users. The problem with keyboard shortcuts is that most users won't know what happened. All they'll know is that suddenly they're not on the same page any more, and then won't realize they've navigated backwards. Therefore they won't think to navigate forwards again, and they won't get back to their form data, even if it is cached.
This happens to me all the time in Emacs. I'll press something by accident, make major unintended changes to my file, and have no idea what I did. Fortunately, Emacs has a way to look up key presses, but this is a relatively advanced feature that typically doesn't exist in other tools anyway.
Whenever you have a feature with zero discoverability (e.g. essentially all keyboard shortcuts), you have to be very careful to avoid the "what did I just do?" phenomenon, even if you provide ways to get back to a previous state. I personally think this change by the Chrome devs is extremely reasonable in that regard.
Edit: I realize that these changes are aggravating to users who actually use them on a regular basis. However, please also realize that they are not zero-cost, because they do impose a constant and non-trivial burden on everyone else (especially in cases like backspace which are relatively easy to hit on accident).