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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

351–360 of 594 posts

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#351

Good. I always set browser.backspace_action to do nothing in Firefox, because this is SO infuriating. You think you have a text field focused but you actually don't (e.g. accidental mouse click removed the focus), you press Backspace and BOOM! suddenly you're on the previous page. Ctrl/Cmd+[ and ] is the real shortcut!

And fuck those who don't have [ and ] in keys of their own.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#352
post #243

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 But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…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

Chromium already puts heroic effort into maintaining form state. Note that, a lot of the time, it works great. For example, here on HN, if you enter half a comment, go back, and then forward, your comment will be preserved.

But it is hard. No browser has succeeded in serializing full tab state: dom, forms, js, pending requests, etc. Chromium has been working on it and has large pieces of it but it is very very hard to get even close to fully correct.

You're letting perfect be the enemy of better.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#353

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 like this idea, but I feel like it would be hard to make sense of in practice. Many things that people would think of as "plain web pages" might have to be classified as applications just because they have some AJAX components. That would satisfy some curmudgeons who don't like what JavaScript has done to the Web, but it would be confusing to the point of worthlessness for everyone else. The alternative is to be extremely liberal about what you classify as a "page," which seems like it would basically be the status quo.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#354
post #236

I wonder if this is in any way related to the exceptionally annoying thing on google.com, where if you hit backspace it doesn't navigate back, but starts removing characters from your search. It does this with other keypresses too, presumably so you can just keep typing till you find whatever you're looking for, but it's a flagrant disregard for my action of moving focus from the input field. In any event, I use back…

Yeah, Chromium on Linux comes without the backspace history navigation for quite some time and I configured it to do the right thing for me: going back in history.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#355
This is actually a no brainer, many times I have accidentally tapped on my mousepad while typing and took the focus away from a textarea then noticed a typo and tried to delete it and baaam you're no longer on that page and possibly all the text you typed has gone into the abyss.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm well aware. I'm saying that the tab should appear to close but persist in the background for a short period of time so that I can Ctrl-Shift-T and get my untouched context back.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#358

I love how most of the comments on the bug tracker are "I've never lost data so therefore no one has and this should go back because I'm used to it." Typical myopic power users...

What's wrong with that attitude? Given the lack of alternatives being offered that seems like a perfectly acceptable complaint.

Given lol is in your username I can't tell if you're trolling or serious...

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#359
post #243

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…

This can be dangerous behavior, or illegal behavior in the case of password fields or credit card information being retained (in JS, you can't backfill password fields, so I don't want my browser doing it with ephemerally cached info). I am fully willing to sacrifice something I don't use (and very few people rely on) over having to refill out a form or risk security to accommodate a very dated and almost unused behavior.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#360
post #243

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 yes, then you click forward and JavaScript on the page wipes all the fields.

Good thinking 99.

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