Chrome removes Backspace to go back • Hacker News Board

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#441

Post by snaky » Thu, May 19, 2016, 10:40 PM UTC

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…

> and the scariest thing for me now is that we'll lose the control we get with current FF options

That seems unstoppable for a long time now. There's no browser for power users in modern world.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#442

Post by seanp2k2 » Thu, May 19, 2016, 10:45 PM UTC

mstade wrote: post #243

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 But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated an…

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…

For form recover, Lazarus is available for Firefox and Chrome and works wonderfully most of the time. It's saved my bacon on many occasions.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#443

Post by Fabroskii » Thu, May 19, 2016, 10:49 PM UTC

mstade wrote: post #243

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…

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…

What about applications that contain a JS environment? Is this not lost when navigating away, unable to be rebuilt from cache by moving forward?

What if my application needs to do something during data entry that can't be replicated by auto-populating the fields?

I believe this is taking power away from web developers and putting it into browser developers. That's a bad thing.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#444

Post by madeofpalk » Thu, May 19, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

cyxxon wrote: post #424

ajnin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the "flaw of averages" article [1] that was posted here a few month back. This seems like a general attitude in Google products features development, they try to find the simplest set of features that will please the most users, but that set probably doesn't exist, each user needs their own tweaks, and in the end their product becomes less useful for everyone. [1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/20…

That page is not readable in Germany: ERROR. The request could not be satisfied. The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. Any idea what could block it? Never seen this before...

> The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country.

Many CDNs can be configured to block access within a country. For whatever reason, that's what The Star has chosen here.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#445

Post by icebraining » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:10 PM UTC

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.

The browser knows how to pause HTML5 videos. If it's Flash, just kill it off.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#446

Post by joelwilliamson » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:13 PM UTC

__david__ wrote: post #311

nkoren wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web no longer consists of just static web pages and form data. I build complex web applications, which are stateful in many ways that don't involve forms (and involve things like websocket connections, etc). There's no way that the browser could possibly recreate that state by going forward. So web apps of any complexity must necessarily intercept the delete key and break its functionality. And to the extent that…

> There's no way that the browser could possibly recreate that state by going forward. Of course there is—just don't delete anything immediately. All your state stays there like it's in its own (hidden) tab and gets lazily garbage collected "some time" later. If the user navigates back, there's nothing to rebuild as everything is still sitting there intact.

People would quickly come to depend on their data not being lost when they leave a page, and then be very unhappy when sometimes it is lost.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#447

Post by Jedd » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:14 PM UTC

nkozyra wrote: post #56

Jedd wrote: post #25

Chrome / 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…

> No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on. I think there's an argument to be made in either direction. I use Chrome (and other apps like Sublime) on three different platforms and would much prefer to have commonality on the application level. Since it's a big part o…

I've been pondering your point for a while.

The problem, I think, comes down to this -- more people use lots of different applications on one platform, than the same application on multiple platforms.

If you're going to use one application only, on multiple platforms, then I could see how a consistency in the way that application behaved would be useful. But I can't see how anyone's workflow wouldn't involve interacting with some number of other applications on each of those platforms.

At that point you could assert all applications on all platforms behave consistently. This is not likely to be a well-received suggestion. Or you could try to make all applications on a particular platform behave consistently. The latter seems to align with people's UI expectations, and, for the most part, is what we have out there now. The pain point is where expected behaviour from one platform bleeds into applications running on different platform where that behaviour might best be described as 'surprising'.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#448

Post by recursive » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:17 PM UTC

ultramancool wrote: post #393

stouset wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it not actually possible to implement this with an addon? It seems possible with a small script embedded in each page. If an addon can't do this, what could it possibly actually do?

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#449

Post by grapeshot » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:25 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #317

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.

I think the backspace thing matters more than spacebar, because spacebar isn't going to cause you to lose (potentially hours of) work. I do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .

Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#450

Post by grapeshot » Thu, May 19, 2016, 11:26 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #317

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.

I think the backspace thing matters more than spacebar, because spacebar isn't going to cause you to lose (potentially hours of) work. I do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .

Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.