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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#501

Post by emp_zealoth »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #495
emp_zealoth wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently a game called M.O.R.E. is lurking around, promising all kinds of crazy depth (I'm super sad how bad SotS 2 was :( ) I totally agree that Stellaris kind of falls flat atm IMO - the foundation is rock solid, the game looks gorgeous and the music just blows you away...but then you play on Hard and literally nothing happens for 6 hours. Eventually a war happens and instantly degenerates into a massive my-blob-…

> Eventually a war happens and instantly degenerates into a massive my-blob-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense :/ You might be surprised by some actual wars.

I would go out on a limb and stipulate that letting an enemy army free reign behind one's lines is a sure way to get rekt. It's just in Stellaris it takes a year for anything to happen from bombardment... It really needs some improvement to wartime movement

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#502

Post by mastazi »

NDizzle wrote: post #493
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…

Complex web applications that have less functionality than what you are trying to replace. Great work!!!

> that have less functionality than what you are trying to replace

How so? Can you elaborate?

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#503

Post by Oduig »

anotheryou wrote: post #114
cptskippy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm primarily on Windows and that first feature annoys the heck out of me. I would rather scrolling stop or continue, but the snap-back when the mouse leaves a zone is irritating. I think the second is more of an optimization because when you click on the address bar you're most likely either copying or overwriting the URL. It's much less common to modify it. If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should c…

With multiple monitors scroll bars are broken anyway. I use drag to scroll assigned to my right mouse button (works great in FF, so so in Chrome): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grab-and-drag... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scrollbar-anywhere... I miss this so much outside my browser...

There are programs like DisplayFusion which take care of scrolling in non-focused windows. I highly recommend it, although it is paid after a while. There must be other tools out there that can do it!

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#504

Post by zamalek »

girvo wrote: post #490
zamalek wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead it can navigate away from a page entirely, if you are in the wrong state when you press backspace This happens to me far too frequently. It's all to easy to mis-click with a track pad (another example of bad HMI), and if you defocus a text box suddenly backspace has a very different effect. Good riddance. I really understand why TotalBiscuit slams games that have dual-bindings. It works against muscle memor…

Dual-bindings in games? I'm unfamiliar with what you mean but am curious!

For example: "F" as an action button as well as to pick up ammo. Ammo full and next to a door with ammo lying on the ground? You might not be able to open the door. The action of the bind changes depending on the context that you are in - exactly like backspace in browsers.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#505

Post by kagamine »

crzwdjk wrote: post #96
ruipgil wrote: post #10

I might be the minority here, but I think that using the backspace to go back is counter intuitive. In my mind backspace is to delete something, and I always worry about that.

This is great news. For some use cases, backspace-as-back is a disaster waiting to happen, for example, in a complex web app used in some time-critical task and that requires occasional deleting of text but can lose state or take a while to reload if you accidentally hit back. If you hit backspace without having a text field focused, the whole thing dies and needs to be reloaded and possibly checked to make sure it's…

It's an edge case, but we recently asked for this 'feature' to be removed from a framework we use because the app opens programs in the browser and does not modify the URl, so backspace took the user to the last URl in history, which was the login page. In other words, while the user was in the middle of some complex task, backspace logged them out and ended the session.

Glad to see it removed, alt+arrow-left/right still exist so the keyboard can still be used.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#506

Post by lloeki »

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…

To me the worst offender is not loss of data (seriously this is just a web form) but loss of context. Having the current location change is disorienting to the user† especially when it's not the expected result.

IIRC Safari had some CMD+Backspace ("Clear history") that I kept on triggering the same way, as in a Cocoa text field it means "Clear from cursor to beginning of line"), but apparently they (thankfully) removed it too. The process, and resulting effect, was the same.

Basically in terms of usability this boils down to the key behaviour following an implicit mode (triggered by what's focused), making it hard to discover (or discovered the hard way) and unpredictable.

This is similar to Safari's braindead CMD+Z that does both "undo in a text{field,area}" and "reopen last tab".

† even though I myself know what happens I am taken aback every single time because it just breaks the flow, resulting in grievous annoyance. Therefore, props to the Chrome team.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#507

Post by prof_hobart »

Arnavion wrote: post #465
stouset wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backspace on Windows Explorer goes up one directory, not back in your history. In a not-at-all shocking turn of events, it turns out Alt-Left and Alt-Right are in fact the hotkeys for navigating backward and forward through history, so Chrome aligns perfectly with Windows Explorer in this regard.

Umm, Backspace in Windows Explorer absolutely does go back in history, unless this changed in Windows 8+ or something (testing on Windows 7 here).

Just tried it on my Windows 7 and it's quite definitely going up one level, not back in history.

If I've got a folder structure

1 | |--1.1 | |--1.2

And I click into 1.1 and then into 1.2, if I then press backspace I end up on 1 (the parent), not 1.1 (the previous in the history).

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#508

Post by smoothdeveloper »

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…

alternatives:

* alert if any form filled by user wasn't submitted (in case site doesn't do that already)

* let 99% of user who don't know what they did (they are in minority compared to number of times backspace is pressed to actually navigate back) retype their form if they don't navigate forward (which recovers their input, or should)

* add a third hand to human race so it doesn't take all the hands to navigate back from keyboard

* lure lenovo to restore the back / forward keys on thinkpads and make that implemented on most keyboards

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#510

Post by ryuuchin »

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…

> Chrome's solution was to call OCSP useless because their less technical users couldn't understand it.

OCSP introduced a non-trivial delay (cited as ~300ms to a second) and there are also privacy concerns with it as well[1]. There's also the fact that it's set to soft-fail when the OCSP servers can't be contacted making it useless in that case[2].

Even if we ignore the above reasons for its exclusion from Chrome they do provide CRLSets which provide similar functionality but are pushed via browser updates (supposedly it's updated daily which makes it faster than OCSP). I'm not sure it's fair to say that they called it "useless because less technical users couldn't understand it". How else can CRLSets be explained then?

[1] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2012/02/05/crlsets.html [2] https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/04/19/revchecking.html

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