Good, now I don't have to fix one of my sites to handle backspace 'properly' that uses a custom keyboard handler for input. What a pain.
Chrome removes Backspace to go back
321–330 of 594 posts
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
Try Ctrl-Shift-T
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with configuration options is that they need maintaining indefinitely to accommodate a small proportion of the user population. That means testing behaviour with the flag on/off, and taking into account the possibility of that flag being on when dealing with bug reports. In this case it's a minor thing which probably wouldn't require much maintainance, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
In most cases that makes complete sense... but this behavior has been around so long. Adding a configuration option means they can track data on if this feature is being used and worth continuing to support. That said, I'm glad they finally did something to fix this bad UX design.
>Adding a configuration option means they can track data on if this feature is being used and worth continuing to support
leaving it enabled also allows them to do this, which they have done for the last couple years and clearly their data says that it's not worth supporting, because now they're dropping it.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is great news. For some use cases, backspace-as-back is a disaster waiting to happen, for example, in a complex web app used in some time-critical task and that requires occasional deleting of text but can lose state or take a while to reload if you accidentally hit back. If you hit backspace without having a text field focused, the whole thing dies and needs to be reloaded and possibly checked to make sure it's…
Giant web forms have been a usability disaster since day one. Accidental back button, link click, window close, session timeout, etc, increase the chance of a failure and need to re-enter the entire form. Whereas for at least 40 years desktop software has given you a "sure you don't want to save?" option.
Plain old web forms are actually not so bad these days, since browsers are pretty good about keeping any entered text around if you accidentally hit the back button (or even if the browser or computer crashes). It's really the big fancy web apps with lots of stateful javascript that are a problem, since the URL doesn't necessarily describe the state of the page and the form fields the browser tried to preserve may not even exist anymore.
In the specific case I'm talking about, it was a big (and rather buggy) pile of stateful javascript, and whose failure would leave a crowd of angry sports fans and player waiting for it to start working again before the game could continue. In retrospect, not using in the the first place would probably have been the better option, but ripping out the backspace keys seemed like a reasonable compromise at the time.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#325I'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…
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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#326Space-bar next!
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#327Chrome / 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 b…
Reminds me of the "flaw of averages" article [1] that was posted here a few month back. This seems like a general attitude in Google products features development, they try to find the simplest set of features that will please the most users, but that set probably doesn't exist, each user needs their own tweaks, and in the end their product becomes less useful for everyone. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/20…
I've come to suspect that the flaw of averages dynamic is indeed deeply instantiated at Google.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > 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…
Keyboard shortcuts are only undiscoverable because apps stopped listing the shortcuts next to the menu items.
Menu items are only discoverable to those who take the time to look through them; the majority of users do not.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you click to the right of everything, then it turns into a textbox and you can modify it at will.
Which doesn't help in the most common case (for me): editing down a URL that's way too long on sites that love to jam absolutely everything they can think of into a query string, extending the URL many screen widths out to the right.
CTRL+L is generally your friend.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#330Earlier 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…
> the ability to press and hold for diacritical marks
Wait, they removed that (I didn’t do the update yet, refused to connect to WiFi to avoid it).
I quite literally use that every minute – typing on UK layout German and British, and trained the dictionary to accept any mix of the two languages.