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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#331

Post by retox »

r00fus wrote: post #261
retox wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tyranny of the vocal minority. It's a race to the bottom.

Do you think it actually makes sense to keep the backspace as "page-back"? It's literally lost me dozens of form entries over the years (some of which were very hard to restore). Thankfully on OSX/Safari, this legacy behavior/cruft is not present.

Seems like change for change sake, like so many of Google changes. Unilaterally changing 20 year behaviour that effects less than half one percent of users isn't an improvement it's rearranging chairs on the titanic.

Also, Lazarus is an old plugin for Firefox that saves forms between sessions/refreshes. Too bad goog want to capture new users at any expense. If it doesn't work because the latest hotness is js forms that's a problem with webdevs.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#333

Post by dredmorbius »

27182818284 wrote: post #148
Jedd wrote: post #25

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 b…

The backspace thing has gotten attention more than ever on sites like Reddit. I have routinely seen posts complaining about it and the spacebar key doing behaviors that users never ever intended. For example, pressing space and then accidentally scrolling down which wasn't their intention at all, but is the behavior of space. I think some of those complaints reaching the front page of reddit may have helped spur this…

Spacebar scroll is standard on many Unix utilities, starting with pagers such as less and more. Given that paging down a screen of text is very likely to be one of the most common things you'll do, and that it's a well-established motif, as well as the fact it doesn't destroy user-state (as back-nav on backspace does), it's quite defensible.

I've never actually seen someone complain about it until now.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#334

Post by coldpie »

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…

Allowing extensions on mobile would deprive them of valuable mobile advertising revenue. uBlock Origin works great in Firefox for Android.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#335

Post by debaserab2 »

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…

Oh man, I can't even imagine the myriad of ways that functionality would fail in today's client side JavaScript apps.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#336

Post by chc »

nitrogen wrote: post #319
eslaught wrote: post #260

Earlier 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.

In the case of "Go back," there are two or three keyboard shortcuts in most browsers, of which I'd guess backspace is probably the least (intentionally) used.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#337

Post by chc »

aeosynth wrote: post #328
nitrogen wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that what "discoverable" means? That if you look for it, you'll find it?

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#338

Post by chc »

__david__ wrote: post #311
nkoren wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's no way that the browser could possibly recreate that state by going forward. Of course there is—just don't delete anything immediately. All your state stays there like it's in its own (hidden) tab and gets lazily garbage collected "some time" later. If the user navigates back, there's nothing to rebuild as everything is still sitting there intact.

While that would work, this seems like the path to "Firefox is too heavy and uses lots of memory."

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#340

Post by OJFord »

shkkmo wrote: post #317
animeweedlord wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gonna be majorly pissed if they disable space bar scroll. I use that quite literally constantly while I'm browsing. It is the scrolling method I use 99% of the time. Backspace to go back, OTOH, I was aware of, but I doubt I ever wanted. Alt-Left is easier to use because it's less modal. Still bothers me in general when devs screw with established defaults.

I think the backspace thing matters more than spacebar, because spacebar isn't going to cause you to lose (potentially hours of) work. I do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .

The most confusing thing is that Youtube and Netflix seem to occasionally toggle pause when you press space; other times Youtube scrolls, and Netflix does nothing (there'd be nowhere to scroll).

I've never managed to consistently replicate it by having had the player in/out of focus already, not/scrolled, etc. odd.

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