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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#381

Post by mcintyre1994 »

douche wrote: post #67
mrweasel wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. is a lot like Outlook (at least on Mac), oh you highlighted something, I'll just go a head and assume that that's the only part of the original email you'll want quotes in the reply... WHY? If I wanted the entire URL highlighted I could just double click on it like in every single other piece of software.

It's infuriating trying to highlight anything in Outlook. Oh, you're dragging to select part of a word, or a huge long URI? Let me go ahead and automatically expand your selection to cover the entire token, with the trailing whitespace. Haha, you're trying to circumvent my helpfulness by setting the cursor and shift-right-arrowing? Haha, no soup for you! Break down and copy it into notepad instead!

iOS is also staggeringly bad at this. Often you highlight part of a webpage and it decides you wanted from the top to that point, which is stupid. Like one paragraph in a reddit comment or wikipedia -> the whole page, menu and all.

I was going to see if it happened here but I can't highlight any of your comment while typing mine.. I can only highlight inside this text box. Good job I don't want to quote anything.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#382

Post by Jtsummers »

makapuf wrote: post #375
shkkmo wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Or maybe like just disable it if there is something to lose ie there is a form and I entered something in it with the keyboard

That would be worse. Then the expected behavior (that backspace would navigate back) wouldn't occur because I'm filling in this form. Even though I've left the field (so backspace is captured by the tab and not the form field) and have decided to abandon the comment and go back to reading the thread.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#383

Post by chc »

panglott wrote: post #373
chc wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Backspace" to go back was new to me, and just sounds like a terrible idea, you'd be accidentally deleting things all the time. Firefox does not have "Go back" accessible through the menu, although the "Backspace" keystroke works. Chrome also does not have a "Go back" accessible through the menu that I can find. Hovering over the Back button shows how to click to access history.

Weirdly, these commands are in the menus for the Mac version (they're the second and third commands in the History menu), but the versions for Windows and Linux don't seem to have them.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#384

Post by dredmorbius »

CydeWeys wrote: post #371
dredmorbius wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People complain about it all the time on anything having to do with video playing, because when the video player has focus space is used to play/pause the video, but when the player is not focused, it scrolls down the page. Frankly, I would be perfectly happy if space to page went away entirely. I exclusively use two finger dragging on laptops and scroll wheels on desktops to browse websites. I never use space to mov…

Most of my desktop use is on a Thinkpad laptop with no mouse and the trackpad disabled.

I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen.

The gaming instance is a failure of Web controls to adequately adapt to context. I can see how that would be distracting. I am not willing to sacrifice my space-to-scroll capabilities on that account.

As with Fitts' law, the spacebar is a very large target. Easy to hit. Frequent action. Well-placed use.

You do raise one other point: scrolling tends to make re-aquiring reading point difficult. That's a fair gripe and one that annoys me.

I'm particularly sensitive to it in DuckDuckGo, which smooth-scrolls a pre-set amount in the SERP when scrolling (I forget if by up/down, pgup/pgdwn, space, or other). I absolutely cannot figure out where I was and where I want to be, and have reported this multiple times.

For long-form text, I've taken a strong preferene, in portrait display devices (my tablet when reading) to fully paginated text, and a page flip mode. Much as PDF is an abysmal format in many ways, I find the capability to retain a spatial memory of where content is on a book or in a page is useful, and generally prefer this to smooth-scrolling.

Pocket, which offers a page-flip mode, makes it both brittle and of limited utility. Any up-down motion whilst flipping a page "breaks" page-flip mode and returns to scroll.

Page-flip doesn't clearly indicate location within the work as a whole (Pocket also mutes the scrollbar indicator generally).

And lastly, the pages aren't consistently presented -- effectivly Pocket repaginates a document whenever and wherever you enter into Page Flip mode. I'd prefer it had a sense of what the pagination breaks were for a given viewport size and font selection, and stuck to that.

Or I could read a book....

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#385

Post by civilian »

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.

110% yes. I've been playing Stellaris, and they actually put hotkey references in the tooltip! I can't do everything with the keyboard, but I'm doing way more than I was. Hotkeys are great and we should encourage more tooltips & labels with them. Not just in videogames, but in anything that could benefit from hotkeys.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#386

Post by stouset »

ultramancool wrote: post #348
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…

> because they do impose a constant and non-trivial burden on everyone else (especially in cases like backspace which are relatively easy to hit on accident). 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 t…

There's a cost to this too, in terms of development effort. Yeah, one option isn't a big deal, but multiply this by the gajillion times that developers have to make a choice between something 99% of their users want.

Backspace-as-back-button is not an "advanced feature". It's a hotkey that essentially no other software uses for the same behavior and one which conflicts crappily with the fundamental behavior of that key. It will take you, generously, a day to relearn the new hotkey. Instead you'd rather the developers maintain indefinitely an option and corresponding logic to support your existing use-case.

If you can't tell, my level of empathy for this kind of griping is roughly zero. Adapt to the new hotkey and save the complaining for something that actually matters.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#387

Post by jandrese »

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 agree with you. The only thing backspace to go back has ever done is make me accidentally navigate away from pages where I am entering data. It's just not ergonomic for my typical use.

Alt-left arrow is harder to type, but it's also harder to mistype. Plus, it's a web browser, my hand is on the mouse when I'm navigating anyway.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#389

Post by animeweedlord »

nitrogen wrote: post #379
animeweedlord wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you losing when you use Ctrl-Shift-T?

Even if everything is cached, there is an annoying delay while the tab is reconstructed and the server is pinged. Even for something as trivial as a directly viewing a single image.

That's my main pain point (I really do think about frequently), but if others are having problems with AJAX-generated forms or whatever, it would help them too.

Another example would be losing your place in on an infinitely scrolling page (yet another web anti-pattern) because you accidentally closed the tab. I would appreciate having a second to correct my mistake before I having to do the"scroll wildly for 30 seconds until it catches up to where I was" song and dance.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#390

Post by animeweedlord »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #365
animeweedlord wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if you're watching a video on youtube? Even if you mute it, the video will continue to play, and if you resume the video later, your saved time will be 5 seconds later than what you thought it was.

Good point. It's times like these I wish there was proper separation between the "hyperlinked documents and dumb form-based UIs" web and the "jerry rigged universal app runtime" web.

EDIT: But if it were an option or an extension, I would gladly enable it to help for 99% of sites I use and either accept the occasional weirdness or blacklist it for Youtube et all

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