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I've never used backspace for nav intentionally, and it has caused annoying data loss for me a few times. It's never made sense to me why this behavior was ever added to browsers. The logical choice would have been the left arrow key (since there is a corresponding right arrow).
I've never used backspace for nav intentionally, and it has caused annoying data loss for me a few times. It's never made sense to me why this behavior was ever added to browsers. The logical choice would have been the left arrow key (since there is a corresponding right arrow).
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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.
Here's the thing about Chrome... They don't want power users.
Remember when you first switched to Chrome? That sleek little pastel colored window elegantly fast. It worked on most websites. It was notably fast on Gmail, which at the time was the slowest website you spent a lot of time on.
You didn't mind that Chrome wasn't configurable. You might even have thought that it would become more configurable over time.
You were wrong. You were never the target audience.
I once had a infuriating (to me, at the time) argument with a Googler who was responsible for an internal app which performed better in Firefox than in Chrome. He said "Use Firefox!". I didn't get it at the time. He was a power user, all his co-workers were power users, and thus the internal app was only used by power users... They all used firefox! At least for real work... (Pretty sure they all had Chrome on hand for Mail and Maps, etc...) Anyway, the internal app correctly targeted firefox.
Meanwhile, back in time, when Chrome came out, Firefox started hemorrhaging users. Mozilla reacted. Today, it's as fast or faster than Chrome for most sites I use. And it's configurable!
If you are reading this, and don't have the latest beta or Nightly FF installed, you should go do so now! Really, trying firefox after being away from years will make you smile and renew your faith in humanity. :)
But unfortunately, this story doesn't end there...
I think some firefox devs see Chrome as a rolemodel... Maybe they want to compete with Google for those users who are not you! As a small example, I offer this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1118285 Note the posts that are marked "Comment hidden (advocacy)". You can click the [+] to show what was hidden (comments from power users).
There are niche browsers for power users, and there are extensions... But there isn't a mainstream browser for power users because power users aren't mainstream.
I'm just describing the problem (well, I hope!), I'm sorry but I don't have a solution.
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…
There is no rational defense for overloading a single button with two totally unrelated functions (navigation and text input). It's a design wart that people are defending on inertia alone.
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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…
The tyranny of the vocal minority. It's a race to the bottom.
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⌘←→ 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.
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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…
So make them an option and stop taking the Chrome route of stripping out everything that more advanced users use regularly.
Of course, this is why I run Firefox. I can do things like force OCSP enabled and get error pages when it fails - Chrome's solution was to call OCSP useless because their less technical users couldn't understand it.
Even Firefox has buried the option behind about:config and the scariest thing for me now is that we'll lose the control we get with current FF options and extensions as they "modernize" the browser.
Advanced users want this level of control.
People who cannot use a mouse or see a screen, who rely exclusively on keyboard commands, will be greatly affected by this change. Global Accessibility Awareness Day https://www.w3.org/WAI/perspectives/
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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.