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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#391

Post by animeweedlord »

dlitz wrote: post #363
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.

Aside from it just being what you're used to, what's wrong with just having PgUp/PgDn for scrolling?

Right hand on mouse, left hand on WASD. The spacebar is always easy to hit your thumb, but you have to move your right hand away the mouse to hit Page Down. Plus it mixes well with Vimperator-like extensions, to the point that I can do 90% of my browsing with one hand.

EDIT: and before anyone points out that if I'm already using extensions I could easily add another, yes and I would if I had to, but it's not ideal, because 1. Extensions crash, fail to load, or aren't allowed by internal browser pages, and 2. You sometimes have to use other peoples' machines and it's annoying when basic functionality is locked away.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#392

Post by swyman »

floatboth wrote: post #186

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!

Thank you so much for reminding me of CMD+[ and CMD+]. I use backspace to navigate all the time and was initially really annoyed, but I remember learning that habit, and this is a usable alternative that I will learn in time as well. To boot, I don't think I ever used a shortcut to navigate forward, and now I have a new shiny.

We're humans, people, we can intentionally learn new things.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#393

Post by ultramancool »

stouset wrote: post #386
ultramancool wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 k…

Sure, I understand your argument, but this is what addons are for.

Users who want it can install an addon for it.

Chrome on the other hand has such weak addon APIs that they are often unable to achieve what's needed. Firefox seems to be moving in the same direction unfortunately.

I think it's worth it for those developers to at least maintain full addon APIs, even though there's a trade-off here it greatly increases the flexibility of the product.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#395

Post by DonHopkins »

civilian wrote: post #385
nitrogen wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stellaris is magnificent! It's incredibly deep and complex, but it has a great user interface, and they've been totally thorough about putting helpful color coded pop-up tooltips everywhere there's something interesting to point at, giving you information about every icon and button, revealing keyboard shortcuts, and telling you one or more tasks that you need to do to first to enable disabled buttons.

I really hate the cargo-cult tradition of disabled menu items that don't tell you anything about why they're disabled, or what you can do to enable them. That's so frustrating, it's like the computer knows something you want to know to do what you want to do, but it won't tell you, because you have to guess.

Even better: Clicking on a disabled item should start a dialog to help you satisfy the prerequisites before performing disabled the action, instead of just ignoring you or telling you to go somewhere else.

I was able to trade alien pets to a highly advanced xenophilic civilization who wouldn't otherwise talk to me, in exchange for civilian access to their space! I felt like Harry Mudd sneaking through Klingon space with a space shuttle full of tribbles!

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#396

Post by panglott »

chc wrote: post #383
panglott wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I was wondering what the Mac versions did, since there's no Backspace. "Press Delete to go back"?

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#397

Post by hosh »

The very first comment says:

"How is someone who grew up in terminal times expected to navigate back when using a two-button mouse?"

I grew up in terminal times. I was lucky that, while growing up, I had access to my father's Unix account through the university. Not only that, I do all of my development work on the terminal (via tmux, vim, and spacemacs). I like the terminal. I love keyboard shortcuts. Keeping my hands in the home row -- awesome!

The backspace in the browser has always struck me as misfeature. I've lost data when typing in forms.

In contrast, when I browse a page, I rarely hit the back button. I'm more likely to open a link in a new page when I am doing serious research.

Times move on. Some things are lost, and our civilization is not for the better. This is not one of those cases.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#399

Post by notJim »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #191
fixermark wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For quite a few users, OSX's entire concept of "quit the currently-active application" is downright archaic.

Do you no longer quit applications in [your operating system]? What's the alternative?

For my work laptop, the same ~6–8 apps are always running. No need to quit anything ever.

At home, where I do a wider variety of things (coding, photography, video stuff) I do quit apps, but there's still a baseline of ~2–3 apps (Chrome + Music + one more) that are always running, which I would guess is pretty typical for most users.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#400

Post by fixermark »

emodendroket wrote: post #230
fixermark wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes it quite difficult to write a terminal emulator web app. Chrome, at least, can resolve this issue by bundling up your web app as a Chrome app; apps launched from the Chrome App Store can launch into a context where the standard Chrome modifier keys aren't mapped.

Why don't you define an alternate button that acts like ctrl? It's the same as how in Windows remote desktop you have to use ctrl-alt-end instead of ctrl-alt-del because the software can't override the handling of that keypress

Probably for similar reasons to the ones people have expressed in this thread about not wanting to have to re-learn backspace. ;) Perfectly doable; doesn't solve the problem of not mapping to what one is accustom to.

I'm an emacs user. If Ctrl-c does something different from starting a chord, I'm gonna have a bad time.

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