Chrome removes Backspace to go back • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#291

Post by te0x » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

mstade wrote: post #243

klodolph wrote: post #239

I'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 But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…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…

> Your solution: Make it harder to move away.

The more genuine way to phrase this would've been something like "Your solution: use different keys for moving away from a form and erasing data", which sounds a lot more reasonable

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#292

Post by 0xfeba » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #262

itslennysfault wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

⌘←→ too... Not sure why there need to be so many back button shortcuts. Glad they removed backspace.

Yes, and for what it's worth, I feel Space to page down is another oddball one. I guess it's for the supremely lazy who don't want to have to move their finger to the Page-Down key.

But at least when you are entering text but mistakenly don't have focus on the text box, you can just scroll back up. Where with backspace, sorry bud... gotta enter all that text again.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#293

Post by dclowd9901 » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #239

I'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 But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…

I appreciate when a product group is brave enough to strip away a traditional behavior to accommodate such a common and annoying case. They knew they were gonna catch holy hell for this one from the small but vocal group of people who use keyboards for absolutely everything and opted for a more user friendly behavior. And I fully believe that people don't know what they want until they're shown it, so I rely on data (common error case) over feedback (vocal backspace users).

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#294

Post by recursive » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

thiht wrote: post #101

crazygringo wrote: post #24

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 rig…

Alt is on the left of the keyboard, Left is on the right of the keyboard... It's annoying to use both hands for such a frequent task

On every keyboard I've ever seen, there's another alt on the right side of the spacebar which works equally well.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#295

Post by hussong » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

jemfinch wrote: post #111

thiht wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alt+Left requires moving both hands, Backspace is only one finger away If only Alt-Gr+Left or Right Ctrl+Left worked...

Alt+Left requires two fingers, but not two hands. You're aware of the alt to the right of the space bar, yes?

Not all keyboards are the same. Think Laptops, international keyboard layouts etc.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#296

Post by shkkmo » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

iopq wrote: post #276

drostie wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sti…

when you get the form back up, the browser should fill it because it should remember the form state from earlier alternatively, just don't browse away when you have something filled in a form - just ask the user if they meant to do that

Detecting and/or saving "something filled in a form" is hard to do with 100% accuracy across all the oddly implemented forms out there. While I feel it has slowly gotten better over the years, especially on well implemented pages, it is still a common enough issue that another solution was needed.

I do wish they had mad a user configurable flag rather than forcing people to use plugins to re-acquire functionality they had before.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#297

Post by EdSharkey » Thu, May 19, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

makecheck wrote: post #235

EdSharkey wrote: post #50

This feels a bit like how Esc was nerfed over the years in Firefox and others until it essentially did nothing. It used to mean STOP. All sockets were closed, the page stopped loading, and I think way waaay back, even animated gifs stopped cycling and JavaScript timeouts and intervals were cancelled. Single-page webapps were the death of Esc, it was too confusing to users to have a page suddenly hang because they pre…

Or maybe, it is well past time for browsers to have two concepts: “page” and “application” windows. That way, web sites that are really trying to be applications can have one set of logical keystrokes, default security models, etc. and plain web pages can have another set. They could be further distinguished by some kind of difference in window frame.

I would like that kind of distinction to be made too somehow for battery life and security/privacy reasons.

I suppose your concept is partially implemented by the "Reader" mode that Safari introduced which I took was an attempt at "zen-ifying" the browser.

I think Reader Mode is largely a flop because 1) it is confusing in that it isn't always on offer by the browser/is context sensitive, which seems like an odd choice, and 2) some pages don't/can't always render sensibly in reader mode for absolute positioning/layout reasons.

My solution to this problem is to give content creators and web application developers better tools to separate between the "page" and "application" use cases.

For "page" content creators, it would be great if they had a framework that poured their content into the browser in an automatically screen-reader accessible way AND was formatted prettily. It's my personal theory that an optimally readable site also happens to read well to a screen-reader, so we can kill two birds with one stone if we abstract the content delivery a bit and force it to be rendered accessibly.

For "application" developers, it would be good to have the framework provide more/better standardized widgets than what the stock HTML5 offers. I'm thinking twisty trees, multi-select lists, streaming infinite scrolls tied to data sources, etc. These widgets would be screen-reader accessible and standard hotkey-enabled where the hotkeys would function the same from site-to-site (mandated by ToS or license).

Finally, the "application" side of this framework would include widgets to display inline "page" content where the user could toggle the "page" content to go full window or full screen and provide that zen reading experience.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#298

Post by vidarh » Thu, May 19, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

perezdev wrote: post #245

>Are you suggesting that the only remaining options are Alt-Left (a two-hand key combo for that I have to move my mouse hand towards the keyboard, and then back) I guess no one told this guy that a standard keyboard has two ALT keys.

You are making assumptions that are invalid for a whole lot of keyboard layouts.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#299

Post by azdle » Thu, May 19, 2016, 6:01 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #206

caffinatedmonk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of annoying things Google has done lately, they recently updated Android's Google Keyboard completely changing the layout, keysize and removing most of the secondary (press and hold for more characters) keys. It has become almost impossible to type with it but I haven't found another keyboard with a good theme, haptic feedback and good suggestions. I miss the days Google used to cater to power users.

If you press and hold on the comma key and go into languages, enabling languages such as French or Spanish will bring back the ability to press and hold for diacritical marks. As for your complaint about key size, I wouldn't know because I use swipe typing exclusively and have found the update a significant improvement. I also really appreciate the new gestures for deleting multiple words by swiping left on backspace…

You don't even need to do that much, if you just enable the "Long press for symbols" option in the preferences you get back the all of the previous behavior of long-pressing letters.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#300

Post by sqeaky » Thu, May 19, 2016, 6:01 PM UTC

Daneel_ wrote: post #174

mrweasel wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

He is helping people on the phone, he might never speak to the same person twice. Settings really aren't a solution for bad UX.