Big thanks to the Chrome devs for this, I applaud and personally appreciate the decision but wonder why a navigation shortcut like this couldn't be made into an option for others to enable or disable based on their preference?
Chrome removes Backspace to go back
431–440 of 594 posts
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#432Earlier 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…
I'm not sure why it'd be hard. "If there's a dom element that's an input of any time, and the user has focused it at any point, ask for confirmation on page exit" would work fine. The only case where I can see it being an issue would be a site that uses a select element as a menu, but I've not seen any do that in years .
I think it can easily get abused, just some hidden focused inputs
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#433The amount of times I've accidentally navigated away from a form by hitting that damn shortcut!
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#434One of the contributors states: "Building an extension for this should be very simple." Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level? Surely it would remove a lot of unnecessary duplicate code.
"Do you want to install "backspace for chrome?" This extension can; See all your data on all websites cant wait
I built an extension that replaces the backspace feature and is open source (so you can install it yourself and check the code).
Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#435Big thanks to the Chrome devs for this, I applaud and personally appreciate the decision but wonder why a navigation shortcut like this couldn't be made into an option for others to enable or disable based on their preference?
so make it disabled by default, but keep it as an option for some users to enable it.
how many users will go to enable it? very few. you shouldn't pollute the settings page with rarely used customisations.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#436This 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…
what does esc do nowadays? can't remember the last time I hit it
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#437Chrome / 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…
In Chrome, obscure configuration options are called "extensions". Instead of searching for them in "advanced settings", you search for them in the extension gallery. The great thing about extensions is that anyone can write them, so you aren't limited by whatever the Chrome team decides to provide.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#438> "We're doing this via a flag so that we can control this behavior should there be sufficient outcry." I love that they decided to do this. I think the justification for taking it away is really good. I also think that the decision to disable via "flag" shows some prescience with respect to how the public reacts to things. Great move and a template for "sound product development".
Yeah, except that they're not doing it this way. >We ended up not having a flag for this. Even if we had it, it would only have been in place for a single release.
Oh! I didn't get that far. Thanks for pointing that out.
From a "best practices" point of view it was a good choice that they at least started with a thought to potential customer reaction.
I do wish they'd left it in. Oh well.
Incidentally thanks for the comment as well, my post above has a few downvotes and whenever that happens I always wonder "what I did wrong"
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#439I'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…
Shortcuts for standard features should be configurable without extensions. The fact that none of the modern browsers implement this is shameful, not the specific choices they make with bindings.
Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back
#440I'm surprised people think this is a bad idea? I know of no one who uses backspace this way in the browser.