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Chrome removes Backspace to go back

bugs.chromium.org

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Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#61

Post by kuschku »

optforfon wrote: post #47
davb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really don't like preferences. I remember before Chrome's new preferences page it seemed to have many more options. I called them out on a few important ones disappearing and the answer was always "Not many people use those, and they confuse new users". For a long while it was impossible to view TLS cert information on Chrome Mobile. One day they just disabled the UI for it. Too confusing for new users if they s…

Same thing with Firefox. It's really frustrating. The options are incredibly sparse. I feel like there is a complete lack of creativity on the part of browser developers are to features that it'd be nice to have

At least Firefox has about:config, and everything can be changed there.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#62

Post by franciscop »

kibwen wrote: post #20

This is going to sound hyperbolic, I'm sure, but backspace-as-back is enormously important to my browsing experience. When I recently installed Ubuntu I had a small moment of panic when I realized that hitting backspace in Firefox performed some Ubuntu-specific thing rather than navigating backwards (as it does in Windows), but fortunately there's an about:config pref to re-enable the behavior. Just my two cents.

I totally changed my habit and forgot about pressing Backspace to go back in Ubuntu Firefox. What have you done?? (thanks)

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#63

Post by cptskippy »

kuschku wrote: post #57
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…

> If you want a supremely annoying address bar, you should check out Windows File Explorer from Vista/7 onward. Each component of the URI is a drop down menu item and only by clicking on whitespace to the far right can you get to the actual URI. Actually, I’m one of the people who like that so much, I enabled it even in KDE Dolphin. EDIT: Due to submission restrictions, I can’t answer right now – I’ll have to wait ab…

How do you use it? I understand how it works but I see no advantage to it over the tree view. I always enable the "expand to location" option so that my tree view is exactly where I am.

To me that address bar abomination is just an obfuscation of otherwise useful information with large clickable regions of functionality I don't want.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#64

Post by Jedd »

wildmusings wrote: post #36
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…

Maintaining software quality is hard. Each additional toggle doubles the size of your test matrix.

I totally appreciate this. I really do.

My defence here is that the test matrix for the way it worked already existed.

And the change would have included some unit tests.

Further, neither the way it worked, or was changed to work, is an especially complex mechanism.

Developer explanations in the bug reports for both were not 'this is going to be hard to maintain', but instead were 'having this configurable will confuse users'.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#65

Post by coldpie »

stephenr wrote: post #28
anotheryou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The change in context is not clear enough for the average user (Text Field or History) and the consequences are really bad (loss of input text).

Does Chrome not prompt you about losing un-submitted changes to a form when triggering a navigation event?

I've never seen a browser do this. It's not clear to me it's a good idea, considering how widely input fields are used behind the scenes. Websites can request that the browser ask before navigating away, but I don't think a browser could reasonably do this automatically without getting it wrong annoyingly often.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#66

Post by lstamour »

stephenr wrote: post #28
anotheryou wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The change in context is not clear enough for the average user (Text Field or History) and the consequences are really bad (loss of input text).

Does Chrome not prompt you about losing un-submitted changes to a form when triggering a navigation event?

Most times, but not always. But it's better now at remembering what you typed if you accidentally navigate back then hit forward. I imagine in some situations I could accidentally lose form or input focus, hit backspace, and then lose everything. This could be an app that manually captures key presses with JavaScript rather than a regular input.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#67

Post by douche »

mrweasel wrote: post #55
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…

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!

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#68

Post by cobalt »

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…

I've never heard of #1 and nor do I see it in any other app (Win 10) and for #2 I think that is how it is done on osx as well. I believe that a majority of google works off of macs so its likely that most of the chrome devs are on macs.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#69

Post by jsnell »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #51
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…

The second is really annoying on Linux because selecting something in X clears the previous selection.

Nope, they actually thought about that. When you click on the url box the selection isn't replaced. So you can totally select an URL elsewhere, click on URL bar, press backspace to clear the bar, and middle-click-paste the selection.

On the other hand selecting the text in the URL bar in any other way (with mouse drag, triple click, or keyboard) will update the selection.

Re: Chrome removes Backspace to go back

#70

Post by coldpie »

tjalex wrote: post #53
kibwen wrote: post #20

This is going to sound hyperbolic, I'm sure, but backspace-as-back is enormously important to my browsing experience. When I recently installed Ubuntu I had a small moment of panic when I realized that hitting backspace in Firefox performed some Ubuntu-specific thing rather than navigating backwards (as it does in Windows), but fortunately there's an about:config pref to re-enable the behavior. Just my two cents.

Agreed -- I am surprised (/disappointed?) they didn't add a replacement shortcut e.g. Alt+Backspace or something similar.

Alt-Left does the trick and isn't ambiguous with "delete a character."
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