Chrome removes Backspace to go back
bugs.chromium.org
bugs.chromium.org
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But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated and weird, and only serve to surprise and annoy us. They herald from an earlier age when people were still figuring things out in new UI paradigms. For example, these days, you expect the scroll wheel to scroll up and down in a scrolling view. However, my coworker was changing some project settings in Visual Studio the other day, and he tried to scroll through the settings while a drop-down menu in the settings had focus. It scrolled through the menu options, selecting them, instead of scrolling through the view. He had to cancel the changes he was making and open the window again, because he couldn't remember what was originally selected.
This is the worst kind of surprise. Something you thought was just supposed to let you look at different parts of the interface instead modified the data you were looking at. Backspace to go back is a similar surprise. It's supposed to delete text, but instead it can navigate away from a page entirely, if you are in the wrong state when you press backspace. For the same reason, I'm even getting sick of the old middle mouse button paste, since it's too easy to press when I'm scrolling.
Forward and back navigation are already mapped to alt + left and right arrow. Let's reserve backspace for deleting text. (I'm not happy that it sometimes means "navigate up a level", but that might tell you what kind of computer I had growing up.)
> 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=608016...)
Safari does this, for instance, and yes it does happen that I accidentally the whole thing by hitting backspace, but it's OK because I know if I just go forward again, it'll all still be there – fully intact.
But along the same lines, I would like it if browsers waited 5 seconds before actually killing a tab that you closed. That would not only fix your problem (if you applied it to page history changes as well), but solve most accidental data loss problems, and most importantly for me, be the end to having to reload entire pages just because I held down Ctrl-W for too long.
EDIT: But if it were an option or an extension, I would gladly enable it to help for 99% of sites I use and either accept the occasional weirdness or blacklist it for Youtube et all
That's my main pain point (I really do think about frequently), but if others are having problems with AJAX-generated forms or whatever, it would help them too.
Another example would be losing your place in on an infinitely scrolling page (yet another web anti-pattern) because you accidentally closed the tab. I would appreciate having a second to correct my mistake before I having to do the"scroll wildly for 30 seconds until it catches up to where I was" song and dance.
alternatively, just don't browse away when you have something filled in a form - just ask the user if they meant to do that
I do wish they had mad a user configurable flag rather than forcing people to use plugins to re-acquire functionality they had before.
if you have written a long paragraph it shouldn't just be lost because you accidentally pressed a key on your keyboard
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 the web increasingly consists of such apps, it means that "delete to go back" has long since being a standard feature that users can count on. That's just a fact on the ground. Time to remove the expectation entirely.
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.
In any event, there are way too many replies to keep count of in this thread, but all I can say is that however Safari does it – it just works(tm). Accidental backspace has literally never been an issue for me since they implemented this. There are convincing arguments why backspace as a short cut is a bad idea to begin with, but old habits die hard, and I for one am very happy that Safari makes this work.
This all seems terribly expensive relative to removing a hotkey used by fewer than 1% of users.
I incline to believe that users that were filling out long forms (and subsequently complaining about losing data because of hitting backspace) were filling out classic old-school static HTML forms, where automatic form restore by Chrome would certainly help.
That space is where complex, dependent-on-javascript-for-no-good-reason forms live. The kind often encountered when dealing with financial & public institutions. It's unlikely that automatic form restore is going to work for a lot of these (especially multi-step wizards & the like) so preventing an extremely common accident seems extremely prudent to me.
Great work!!!
How so? Can you elaborate?
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 if it is cached.
This happens to me all the time in Emacs. I'll press something by accident, make major unintended changes to my file, and have no idea what I did. Fortunately, Emacs has a way to look up key presses, but this is a relatively advanced feature that typically doesn't exist in other tools anyway.
Whenever you have a feature with zero discoverability (e.g. essentially all keyboard shortcuts), you have to be very careful to avoid the "what did I just do?" phenomenon, even if you provide ways to get back to a previous state. I personally think this change by the Chrome devs is extremely reasonable in that regard.
Edit: I realize that these changes are aggravating to users who actually use them on a regular basis. However, please also realize that they are not zero-cost, 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).
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.
Does not work for me, FF 38. This feature used to throw me out of forms all the time, there has been a couple of years that it stopped.
Now the only FF keystroke that annoys me is the CTRL-q for closing the window, that conveniently is just by the side of CTRL-w for closing the tab, and does not save the window state.
Are you on Linux? Backspace to go back only works on Windows and OS X because this behavior was apparently un-Linux-like. You can change this behavior with the browser.backspace_action about:config pref:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action
Here is a Firefox bug to make Backspace work on Linux Firefox the same as it does on Windows and OS X:
Do any of these options work to get your state back after accidentally closing the browser?(1) Is control-w significantly different than pressing the x on the Window? Just curious.
(1) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-restore-my-tab...
(Might not work if you delete history on close)
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!
Mind you I'm enjoying it but many parts fall extremely flat. Like corvette balance and topped war scores.
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-chasing-your-blob-benny-hill-nonsense :/ And you can't even achieve anything because of 100 warscore limit! Apparently there are serious improvements coming soon though(Allegedly a lot of content wasn't polished enough before the deadline so minimal viable product happened)
In our attempts at multiplayer, we've already reduced ourselves to calling this "Yakety Saxxing".
You might be surprised by some actual wars.
EU4 has taken close to a decade to get where it is.
(I.e. "You just traveled to the end of a line and deleted a ". You could have done 'A[esc]dw' or whatever it is. Like I said, I'm bad at vim over here.)
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 to call OCSP useless because their less technical users couldn't understand it.
Even Firefox has buried the option behind about:config and the scariest thing for me now is that we'll lose the control we get with current FF options and extensions as they "modernize" the browser.
Advanced users want this level of control.
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 key. It will take you, generously, a day to relearn the new hotkey. Instead you'd rather the developers maintain indefinitely an option and corresponding logic to support your existing use-case.
If you can't tell, my level of empathy for this kind of griping is roughly zero. Adapt to the new hotkey and save the complaining for something that actually matters.
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.
Except for Windows Explorer, but who uses that, eh?
Your level of empathy is immaterial to the conversation, but thanks for sharing.
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.
I definitely believe removing backspace-to-go-back in the browser is the right choice. I did know about that one, solely because every so often I do it by mistake. The problem isn't that I lose data -- I don't. The problem is that this shortcut does nothing but cause me problems I don't want. I never want the functionality, and yet it keeps happening to me anyway because it's so easy to trigger unintentionally. There's no case for this shortcut continuing to exist.
[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/keyboard-shortcut...
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).
Then click on "Folder3" to go directly to Folder3.
Then press BackSpace, you will go back to Folder5, not Folder2.
To go up the shortcut is ALT Arrow Up.
Now when there is nothing to go back to (you opened a sub folder directly), Backspace goes up instead of doing nothing.
* 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
The number of times I've accidentally hit the back-a-page button on my old X201, and wiped my in-progress form entry...
They smooshed those keys right around the arrow keys. The arrow keys I use to jumping around text.
That's worse than having a dual-use for backspace to me.
Backspace is far enough away that it's not hit by accident.
It really feels chromium team should install telemetry:
* how many unsubmitted forms edits lost by mistake
* how many backspace keystroke to do "history-back"
They should also consider alt-gr + left as "back-history", using two hands for this could be avoided this way.
It's absolutely amazing how many comments (500++ as I write this) that this "news" generated.
That seems unstoppable for a long time now. There's no browser for power users in modern world.
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
Yes, notice that I called for OCSP force/required, not just OCSP soft-fail. I've been running OCSP required for years and never had any noticeable slowdown. Maybe there's one on the first connection of the day to a site or something?
Chrome's CRLSets are extremely limited and cannot begin to capture the full number of domains which have been revoked. They can get the most popular sites and that's about it.
OCSP stapling is the superior solution which will solve this in Chrome and other browsers, but for now OCSP is the only reasonable solution in a world where millions of SSL certificates have leaked and been revoked and you care about your privacy. CloudFlare alone revoked millions of certificates. These have indeed not all made it into the CRLsets.
An excellent summary of the problems is here: https://www.grc.com/revocation/crlsets.htm
Chrome's CRLsets contain less than 1% of current revoked certificates. I can't in good faith call that a valid solution to the problem.
[1] https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#Enable...
[2] https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#Requir...
Did you really use backspace and "move back" on regular basis? Why? You most likely aren't browsing the web with just your keyboard, so unless you are a leftie it requires you to either move your hand back to keyboard or move your hand across the whole keyboard and why would you do either of these when you can just move back with your mouses thumb button?
Because I'm far more likely to accidentally press the mouse thumb button, hence it's rebound.
If this is true, it's a very convincing argument – I'd buy it for a dollar. In any event, my personal preference is to keep this backspace behavior, and my browser of choice (Safari) implements this caching perfectly.
At this point, not only am I ok with the accidental back navigation, but also I actively rely on things working this way. For instance, here on HN I routinely hit back and forward to see what people wrote, and Safari keeps my drafts perfectly well.
The more genuine way to phrase this would've been something like "Your solution: use different keys for moving away from a form and erasing data", which sounds a lot more reasonable
There is no rational defense for overloading a single button with two totally unrelated functions (navigation and text input). It's a design wart that people are defending on inertia alone.
In a better world, there would be much clearer defined intermediate interfaces between keyboard hardware, operating system, and final software (e.g. the native app, system shortcut, or browser javascript) performing the action for the user. Every interface would be clean and straight-forward, and easy for the user to adapt to her preferences.
In the world we live in, there are a confusing mishmash of 6–7 intermediate layers, which differ on each operating system and keyboard, some of which can be partially adapted by the user, but many of which can’t. These layers are poorly defined, not understood by users, and reach into each-other with various ugly hacks, and they often co-opt each-other’s keyboard shortcuts in arbitrary and confusing ways.
But it is hard. No browser has succeeded in serializing full tab state: dom, forms, js, pending requests, etc. Chromium has been working on it and has large pieces of it but it is very very hard to get even close to fully correct.
You're letting perfect be the enemy of better.
Good thinking 99.
>Why not disable backspace only when some form has data entered? Why remove the feature in all cases when the reason only applies to some?
Caching local content as drafts-in-process does in fact make a great deal of sense.
How to present that poses a new set of UI/UX considerations. Perhaps not grave, but significant.
I do hold strongly that the "backspace to navigate* motif is either profoundly broken or tied to unacceptably weak state stickiness of editing content itself. It's a callousness, capriciousness, and lack of consideration on the part of browser developers to users concerns (as opposed to advertisers) which I'm very hard pressed to defend on any basis.
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.
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.
i thought you were applying some subtle commentary about the change until i saw you agree with it.
It still did not help them gain more than 4% marketshare.
The difference with that feature and the topic at hand is that, should someone in X/Wayland decide to rip it out, there will be a config file I can easily modify to turn "middle_mouse_paste=0" to "middle_mouse_paste=1" and keep a very precious piece of functionality, indefinitely.
I'm going to agree with you. Backspace is a totally weird shortcut for navigation and I can't say I've seen it used anywhere else for "get my back to where I was" outside of a browser (it's almost always escape or some function key or other combination).
Alt/Command+Left/Right Arrow has been my go-to for navigation in the browser for years now, especially since "forward" has no other shortcut.
That's a mischaracterization. After all, for the people who use keyboards for absolutely everything, there are still two keyboard chords for "go back a page".
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 memory.
Alt-left arrow is harder to type, but it's also harder to mistype. Plus, it's a web browser, my hand is on the mouse when I'm navigating anyway.
Is there any other dedicated button or shortcut that would work better for that purpose for us?
I suspect there is, but I don't know what it would be yet.
Works on every platform. Even on Android (last I tried years ago).
If you go for a 122-key or 127-key keyboard like these:
* http://casasbahia.com.br/Informatica/AcessoriosePerifericos/...
* http://buscapro.com.br/Teclado-Multimidia-Usb-Abnt2-Portugue...
... then the dedicated buttons are the "forward" and "back" keys on the top row.
In 554 comments discussing "power users" and "people who use keyboards for absolutely everything" I think this to be the first mention of the forward and back keys on "multimedia"/"internet" keyboards. Do "power users" not lust after keyboards with lots of keys any more? (-:
Here's one with a telephone, as well as "forward" and "back" keys for WWW browsing:
* http://www.compulogic.com.ar/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=...
Historical aside: The "Space Cadet" keyboard actually had fewer keys than these.
While I agree with you, the problem is that keyboard shortcuts aren't completely configurable. If they were, the Chrome developers could just tell the whiners to go pound sand and configure it themselves.
The problem is that the Chrome developers don't want to put in the hard work to make keyboard shortcuts properly configurable. They want to take the shortcut of just removing the functionality and everybody to go away.
I'm one of those people that types "backspace" and goes back unintentionally way too often.
I've lost form data because of this!
Spoken like someone who never used a typewriter. Backspace is not an eraser key, it historically does what it says. Takes you back a space. Making it an eraser key is what was "weird...when people were still figuring things out in new UI paradigms."
Having backspace take you back, may be closer to the original function of the key.
Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.
I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.
1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and
2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.
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.
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'.
Edit: they could maintain a flag to change these behaviours though, if they were a concern. You could also build your own copy of the browser, patched as you wish... ;-)
It used to be different, but that behavior unfortunately has made it to default in OS X now. It annoys me to no small extend, since I very frequently want to edit URL's to remove session ID's or reference tokens. Of course, the average user is to daft to double-click...
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 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.
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.
(Unless I'm mistaken, the right-click copy uses a different clipboard, so you can't use that.)
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 about an hour before I can answer comments, sorry.
To me that address bar abomination is just an obfuscation of otherwise useful information with large clickable regions of functionality I don't want.
My main computer is a Mac and I very much wish its "Finder" had navigation tools as nice as the "breadcrumb bar" you are describing in Windows.
It's not completely the same as on Windows, but:
- Shift-Apple-G lets you enter a directory path to open (including bash-like completion with tab).
- Option-Apple-P shows/hides the "path bar" at the lower edge of a window where the hierarchy of the current folder is displayed (including a spartan context menu).
On Windows I mainly use the explorer address bar to go to those hidden folders like ProgramData.
I think there is also a "show breadcrumbs" option in the preferences for Finder, which may or may not give more of the functionality you want.
Well, the tree view in dolphin is small, and mostly hidden by the bookmark menu.
So I have to resort to using the breadcrumbs as a poor (wo-)mans tree view.
It's the fact it's inconsistent on my platform (KDE on Debian GNU/Linux) exacerbates the annoyance. I should not have to consider which application I'm in, in order to preempt the way the scrollbar / mouse will work.
With the second - I appreciate that for many people, for much of the time, you're wanting to type something else into the address bar. However, on MS Windows you have to type ctrl-c / ctrl-v to copy / paste. On real operating systems <tm> you just have to select the region -- so having a whole line selected for you when you click near it is unwanted.
But ultimately it's the inconsistency. I need to consider if I'm clicking in the address bar, or another text box, in order to predict what's about to be selected.
And, yes, the Win7 explorer bar has moved me to tears also. I can highly recommend the breadcrumbkiller [1] - even if you don't install it, the rant on that guy's page is well worth reading.
[1] http://twigstechtips.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/win7-remove-win...
If you're in folder "C:\foo\bar\baz\boz\" and want to go to "C:\foo\" it's just one mouse click. Or if you want to go to "C:\foo\bor" that's just two mouse clicks. Much faster than clicking "back" or "up" multiple times.
Going from memory since I couldn't reproduce this behavior in 7. Could also be wrong about 10; someone else should try it and confirm.
Yeah, I remember doing it once and thinking it was extremely helpful at the time, but I only remember doing it once so far.
I agree with parent, the adress bar should be the adress bar. Also better for sans-mouse-use. Just F6 and end, ctrl+shift+left arrow until you get to before "bar" and then backspace, enter.
Sure, it's more input but it's still way faster than reaching for your mouse.
No, it's unpredictable amount of clicks, drags and scrolls to unpredictable places, if C:\foo\bor is not immediately visible in the tree view. And worse, if there is "bor" in every one of 100 "foos" you have on C:.
You can also right click the bar to edit or copy the URI...
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...
I liked it (back when it existed on Mac OS X): By moving the mouse horizontally to the vertical scroll bar I could instantly return to where I started scrolling. Use case: Read something (web page, source code...), scroll around to look for related information, then return back to the exact position I was before.
> 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.
And you also have the confusing "copy address" / "copy address as text" context menu.
If I wanted the entire URL highlighted I could just double click on it like in every single other piece of software.
Worst feature EVER. I can't begin count how many times I've had the following talk with users:
user: My password doesn't work
me: Did you copy it from Outlook?
Problem solved.
It's terrible. Really.
I was going to see if it happened here but I can't highlight any of your comment while typing mine.. I can only highlight inside this text box. Good job I don't want to quote anything.
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 of my workflow, having it work differently from OS to OS would definitely slow me down.
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'.
This is one of the annoyances on Windows. On Linux/OSX you can click and drag on the URL to select a portion of the string, but on Windows it auto-highlights the full string completely, forcing one to reclick again (slowly!) to highlight a portion.
Also: right-clicking on a link in Linux/OSX auto-highlights the full link text so you can `Copy` or `Search on Google` the highlighted text. In Windows you must manually highlight the link, then right-click on it.
Small things add up to big annoyances.
Works fine on Windows. Just don't click into the address bar before dragging and everything works as you'd expect. With clicking first you have a selection, though, and dragging that will do drag & drop of text instead.
I think some of those complaints reaching the front page of reddit may have helped spur this into action by the Chrome team.
It's a race to the bottom.
Thankfully on OSX/Safari, this legacy behavior/cruft is not present.
Also, Lazarus is an old plugin for Firefox that saves forms between sessions/refreshes. Too bad goog want to capture new users at any expense. If it doesn't work because the latest hotness is js forms that's a problem with webdevs.
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 do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .
I've never managed to consistently replicate it by having had the player in/out of focus already, not/scrolled, etc. odd.
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.
I've never actually seen someone complain about it until now.
Frankly, I would be perfectly happy if space to page went away entirely. I exclusively use two finger dragging on laptops and scroll wheels on desktops to browse websites. I never use space to move down a whole page at a time, and that's a jarring action anyway because it inevitably causes me to lose the context of where I was reading in the document in a way that smooth scrolling accomplished through other means does not.
I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen.
The gaming instance is a failure of Web controls to adequately adapt to context. I can see how that would be distracting. I am not willing to sacrifice my space-to-scroll capabilities on that account.
As with Fitts' law, the spacebar is a very large target. Easy to hit. Frequent action. Well-placed use.
You do raise one other point: scrolling tends to make re-aquiring reading point difficult. That's a fair gripe and one that annoys me.
I'm particularly sensitive to it in DuckDuckGo, which smooth-scrolls a pre-set amount in the SERP when scrolling (I forget if by up/down, pgup/pgdwn, space, or other). I absolutely cannot figure out where I was and where I want to be, and have reported this multiple times.
For long-form text, I've taken a strong preferene, in portrait display devices (my tablet when reading) to fully paginated text, and a page flip mode. Much as PDF is an abysmal format in many ways, I find the capability to retain a spatial memory of where content is on a book or in a page is useful, and generally prefer this to smooth-scrolling.
Pocket, which offers a page-flip mode, makes it both brittle and of limited utility. Any up-down motion whilst flipping a page "breaks" page-flip mode and returns to scroll.
Page-flip doesn't clearly indicate location within the work as a whole (Pocket also mutes the scrollbar indicator generally).
And lastly, the pages aren't consistently presented -- effectivly Pocket repaginates a document whenever and wherever you enter into Page Flip mode. I'd prefer it had a sense of what the pagination breaks were for a given viewport size and font selection, and stuck to that.
Or I could read a book....
> I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen.
I use the middle button + trackpoint for scrolling - works great. That's the default on most Linux distros/desktop environments, might require some configuration on Windows.
Fitts' Law.
I don't find it jarring at all to read that way, because I know where to resume reading after hitting space. There is one exception: a lot of websites with absolutely-positioned headers scroll incorrectly when you hit space, such that the point you would resume reading at ends up behind the header, and you have to scroll up a bit to reveal it.
A few websites with headers get it right, and your resume point is below the header after hitting space. This makes me much less sympathetic to the websites that screw it up.
I do use paginated reading on my Kindle, which always gets it right. It doesn't quite work properly on the web often enough though.
The kind of people who are willing to go to the Advanced Configuration Settings page are also willing to tweak their keyboard mappings to map any modifier key they want to to the "go back in history" accelerator for Chrome.
Wait, they removed that (I didn’t do the update yet, refused to connect to WiFi to avoid it).
I quite literally use that every minute – typing on UK layout German and British, and trained the dictionary to accept any mix of the two languages.
What Linux users wanted was for it to behave normally - i.e. not auto select, but set primary selection if you selected something in the URL. The auto select was apparently non-negotiable, so we ended up with the current compromise.
It does set the primary selection if you manually select some/all of the URL though.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
Any idea what could block it? Never seen this before...
Many CDNs can be configured to block access within a country. For whatever reason, that's what The Star has chosen here.
now if only our cars are as adjustable, given the almost-similar circumstances
In this case it's a minor thing which probably wouldn't require much maintainance, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
That said, I'm glad they finally did something to fix this bad UX design.
leaving it enabled also allows them to do this, which they have done for the last couple years and clearly their data says that it's not worth supporting, because now they're dropping it.
If option for backspace behaviour suddenly starts interfering with some unrelated feature, it means somebody seriously fucked up the architecture of the project. Nothing else. Configuration flags aren't scary, and should not be used as a rationalization for dumbing down software.
In this case, the right thing really is contextual, so a configuration or extant setting / default is worth the cost in complexity.
The quote "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" comes to mind here.
This is a shortcut button … The maintenance argument is really a straw-man in this case …
> but you have to draw the line somewhere.
And this shows that they chose to place this line at «this product is our product, there is no customization options»
From the maintainer's point-of-view, having the option to bind "backspace" to "window.history.back" shouldn't require any more maintenance than having the option to bind "alt-left" to "window.history.back" does.
It is Google's fault that they didn't make Chrome work this way. It also means I can't unbind "ctrl-shift-q" from "quit_immediately_without_asking", because Google refuse to add an option to make it so that I can't accidentally fat-finger a C-w into something that ends my entire session. All keyboard shortcut problems disappear instantly if key bindings are configurable, however, without adding new options for each command.
There's been a general trend in computing for a while now to not have any kind of configurability. You can see it in most of the major UIs now. And from what I've read on tech discussion forums, techies themselves absolutely hate configurability: they complain that they don't want to have to slog through a bunch of configuration options for everything, they want things to be set up to their preference out-of-the-box.
If you do a search for "JavaScript" and then later perform a search for Java by typing "Java[Enter]", it will do a search for "JavaScript" instead, possibly before you have time to react. To prevent this, you have to stop before pressing [Enter] for each search to make sure it doesn't auto-fill, then press backspace if it did.
This feature cannot be turned off, and the faster you are at typing, the more aggravating it is.
Isn't Chromium opensource? I'm sure they'll accept your pull request.
- Make changes that annoy some users
- For fear of annoying anyone, keep adding without ever removing, increase the number of settings, in other words bloat. Until a new, "lighter" alternative products comes and everyone moves out from your bloated product
So yes, by removing features that they realized weren't good one, they're keeping the product simple.
edit: chrome doesn't warn, but browsers can re-fill the input forms when you navigate forwards again. This doesn't help if the state of the website was more complex and fails to resume.
(2) The concept of a "form" is less and less clear in the realm of web apps.
In the context of html in a browser, a form isn't a concept to be debated, it's a well understood element defined in the html standard.
If an app chooses to not use html forms and instead uses something like contenteditable to create its own editing environment, then you likely have much bigger issues than the back button.
It's an application-level question, not a system question. Can only be answered with semantic knowledge of the importance of the user input.
For instance if I close this tab, where I'm typing the comment, there will be no prompt. Whereas facebook will prompt me if truly want to leave the page.
There's an extension (SuperStop I believe?) that partly restores it if you shift-esc, but recently I've found that invasive keybindings in pages (Slack, I think?) can intercept this and stop it working.
I'd really like a whitelist somewhere of what keys/combos I'd like the page to be able to catch, vs those which I expect and rely on to perform native functions, and which shouldn't be hookable (Github trying to cleverly intercept '/' and take you to the search field would be great, if / wasn't already a shortcut for searching the page, etc.
This is a change that should've happened a long time ago.
Except for (guess who?) Chromium...
how would you correct mistakes? with the delete button?
Glad to see it removed, alt+arrow-left/right still exist so the keyboard can still be used.
Ctrl/Cmd+[ and ] is the real shortcut!
Page-Down means I have to almost move my hand away from the keyboard (middle finger to the top right corner, can't hit it with other fingers because display) -- that feels like grabbing for the mouse...
Historically, space is also the hotkey for 'more'.
Recently, Andreeson said that he never expected the forward and back buttons to last this long. He assumed they were temporary measures until something better came along. Nothing ever did it seems.
Worse, I tried MS's Edge browser and found that the spacebar is now a back button. I am completely baffled by this. I am so used to the space bar as a scroll down, I can't think what misappropriation of ideas and user testing must be going on at MS right now to make this change. Its truly bizarre and really killed my faith in MS finally getting browsers right.
If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.
P.S.: Oh and if it's a crappy touchpad making unwanted inputs, then I share your concern (and probably a good time to look at other laptop keyboards; turning off the touchpad on this Lenovo was among the first things I did). But still, they really should make this an option...
Oh, give me a freaking break. You never accidentally click the wrong things? And you never visit a page that "helpfully" plays around with the default focus behavior?
In the end I find this Chrom(e|ium) change to be the wrong solution to a questionable problem and a regression (a proper fix would introduce fully/mostly rebindable keys).
FWIW, on my laptop, ALT+Left would be a full spread of the hand and I have to move my torso to get the hand in position.
Not everyone uses a mouse all the time.
Worst thing in a demo/presentation to accidentally lose all your inputs and are forced to retype while a) people are watching and b) you might also be recorded.
We're humans, people, we can intentionally learn new things.
"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.
There is one, on KDE level. Any KDE app has generic-looking hotkey remapper under settings menu. It just works.
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts -> [+]
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 stumble in there.
Dumb.
I am surprised Apple hasn't encouraged users to do that, come to think of it.
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.
Nowadays, you can generally trust your OS to page an app in and out and devote no resources to it if the resources aren't needed. Quitting an app is for misbehaving apps, which isn't assumed to be the common case.
See all your data on all websites
cant wait
Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...
It turns out this extension does exist. I just used it to assign "shift+backspace" to "Go Back" and it worked.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortkeys-custom-k...
Which is then followed, amusingly, by a developer who has tried to do it saying that in fact, it's not that simple (without ridiculous permissions).
But now it seems to have turned into a face-saving thing where the Chrome developers won't ever reverse the change or put in a configuration option because to do so would be to admit a mistake in public.
Personally I am shocked that the Chromium team ignored years of user complaints before they decided to fix what their own usability studies found to be a worthless yet painful gimmick.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/R-wESj...
These advanced power users want the unfathomable ability to install Chrome in a different directory. The only solution involves downloading the Windows "Junction" utility and creating a symbolic link. Surprisingly, an actual employee (uh, "Googler," whatever that means) deigns to appear, but only to inform everyone that there is no solution except to download Chrome from Google Pack. The Pack version won't let you pick a location either, but its default is different, or at least it was until Google Pack was discontinued.
You know what, I think I'm just going to see how Firefox has been doing. I can't even remember why I switched.
In general I've found that FF have been proactively fixing their perf, memory and usability stories. With exception to the rare occurrence such as this, Chrome has been on a steady decline.
It's the first thing I'm always enabling on every new Firefox installation since they disabled it by default several years ago.
And with sufficiently large user base, even 0.04% means "lots of people being pissed off now".
If you were a drugstore and had a drug that was functionally identical to aspirin but caused day-long projectile vomiting in 99.96% of people who took it, would you think it was a great idea to hide the aspirin in the back and give the drug that is almost guaranteed to cause harm to someone as the default?
Though I am a frequent user of backspace in Chrome I'm inclined to agree with their decision. Almost no one is using it and casual users are confused by it.
I'll just wait for someone to implement the feature in an extension.
I'm always a bit apprehensive to enable those sort of extensions.
This would be a very simple piece of code so getting no updates is actually better for security in this case IMHO.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969?hl=en
EDIT: And prompts you to disable it at startup if it's unpacked.
I actually use Page-Down instead of space which I suspect makes me weird but I feel like Space should be next on the hit-list as long as they are cleaning up confusing shortcuts.
No seriously, if any Chrome devs are reading this, I will go back to Firefox tomorrow if you break Space.
So it would be hopefully possible to re-enable it via chrome://flags or something like --enable-backspace…
Edit: Or not –– "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."
If only Alt-Gr+Left or Right Ctrl+Left worked...
And if one includes North America and South America in "American" the same goes for the Canadian Multilingual and the Brazilian Portuguese layouts. (-:
Also extension have a discoverability issue.
I am pretty sure that the chrome team got the telemetry data to justify this "feature" removal. But I am really more in the "use a flag camp"
For those wondering how, if you do control backspace to erase a word etc igs very easy to miss, especially as you transition between word delete and single character delete.
The other common use case for errors is when u think you're in a field editing and you're actually not, bam, you just lost all your form data.
I also like the idea that backspace is for text editing and not for a second feature such as navigation. For enter yes but not backspace
Single-page webapps were the death of Esc, it was too confusing to users to have a page suddenly hang because they pressed Esc for some reason and all the XHR connections silently closed. "Stopping" just no longer made sense.
Just going to need to train the old timers on the new key strokes. It is sad though when convenient controls are taken away.
After the smoke cleared, I came to the conclusion that Firefox had crossed a threshold and transformed from being a networked document display application to being an operating environment that was a platform for applications. Javascript, the DOM and CSS had advanced to the point where keyboard controls biased towards convenient document browsing no longer made sense.
I'd be all for Firefox removing the Backspace default keybinding even though it would slightly inconvenience me since that's the key I use to go back.
That way, web sites that are really trying to be applications can have one set of logical keystrokes, default security models, etc. and plain web pages can have another set. They could be further distinguished by some kind of difference in window frame.
I suppose your concept is partially implemented by the "Reader" mode that Safari introduced which I took was an attempt at "zen-ifying" the browser.
I think Reader Mode is largely a flop because 1) it is confusing in that it isn't always on offer by the browser/is context sensitive, which seems like an odd choice, and 2) some pages don't/can't always render sensibly in reader mode for absolute positioning/layout reasons.
My solution to this problem is to give content creators and web application developers better tools to separate between the "page" and "application" use cases.
For "page" content creators, it would be great if they had a framework that poured their content into the browser in an automatically screen-reader accessible way AND was formatted prettily. It's my personal theory that an optimally readable site also happens to read well to a screen-reader, so we can kill two birds with one stone if we abstract the content delivery a bit and force it to be rendered accessibly.
For "application" developers, it would be good to have the framework provide more/better standardized widgets than what the stock HTML5 offers. I'm thinking twisty trees, multi-select lists, streaming infinite scrolls tied to data sources, etc. These widgets would be screen-reader accessible and standard hotkey-enabled where the hotkeys would function the same from site-to-site (mandated by ToS or license).
Finally, the "application" side of this framework would include widgets to display inline "page" content where the user could toggle the "page" content to go full window or full screen and provide that zen reading experience.
Ironically, that's probably the reverse of reality. Looking at the comments here, for starters, we have people espousing views that things have "always" been this way, and quoting their experiences of "the past ten years". It's the young people who are having problems and need to be re-trained here.
The "old timers" will, conversely, have experienced data entry on terminals or in MS-DOS programs like (say) Borland Paradox, where of course things like a backspace key will at most have moved from field to field on a single page, if indeed it caused inter-field motion at all. (The CUA Guidelines give no indication that autotab applies to backspacing from the first field position, i.e. auto back tab. There's a COMPSEC83 paper that talks about it, though.) Backspace certainly didn't switch forms.
Leave my muscle memory alone please.
What's still really annoying is that cmd-back doesn't work if a text input is focussed, so navigating back through several pages becomes a game of repeated cmd-left, interspersed with left clicks on a 'non-active' part of the page, or a series of TABs to leave all inputs.
It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.
No?
One thing I like about my venerable x220 is the dedicated forward & backward keys that can also be used to switch buffers in emacs etc.
Use a browser that will warn you about losing un-submitted form contents before navigating away?
> It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.
I think we have very different definitions of "everyone".
Most browsers don't do this. If you see a warning like that, it's usually triggered by javascript on the web page itself.
You live in your own little world, don't you?
I've never seen backspace act differently once I'd deleted everything. If a form field has focus -- even an empty form field -- backspace doesn't make me lose the page.
(On the other hand, I started this morning hating Chrome for getting rid of the functionality I've used since last century, but I'm now coming to accept it.)
I'll search for something, decide to go back, and now I'm deleting my search term instead. And the fact that Google searches based on what's in my search box (without having to hit enter) I've actually "lost" search results that way.
I'm an avid backspace-as-back user, so I went searching for a solution as soon as they introduced focus-stealing.
Backspace (despite the name) is for deletion, should only be for deletion, and avoids confusion by only being for deletion. Period.
I don't see what's so hard about control/command-leftbracket or left arrow or whatever you want to assign to "go back". At least you won't accidentally wipe a form.
Anyway, this isn't about you or me, as someone else said, because forward state could be theoretically preserved. The problem is the 99% of "regular people" who will hit Backspace, not realize that they DIDN'T just lose their form and can just hit Forward again, and will redo the work and get frustrated.
And I'm using the word clever in its most negative way here.
Also, what's so hard with tapping Cmd+Left or Ctrl+Left to go back? It's all I've ever done, incredibly intuitive, and simply to do with one hand (using the right Cmd button), at least on most keyboards I've seen.
Relying on current context to determine the behavior of backspace was a terrible idea from the start. To hell with your muscle memory. Re-learn a shortcut that makes sense, and which will save you time one day, rather than insisting with hacker-machismo that you've never lost data in a form.
If you can fill out a formular field correctly without losing focus, you are not part of Chrome's target audience.
edit: Had to type this four times due to accidently going back.> 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=608016...)
I never have this problem in Safari, and I use backspace all the time for navigating back.
That's funny, because I've got a brand new install of El Cap in from top me, and backspace does nothing in Safari. Maybe you turned on an option or accessibility feature somewhere?
...but seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I've tried to hit "delete" (backspace on mac) to delete something I had selected in a web app and had it navigate back losing my unsaved changes I'd have a couple bucks.
It's rare, but it's annoying when it does happen.
I can't tell you how many times I've lost data because of backspace! Good riddance.
Now, please also get rid of pull down to refresh in iOS Chrome because that has also lost me data a ton of times as well. I don't even know who uses that feature. I don't need to refresh most pages and if I do there are better ways.
"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.
I actually just lost a draft of an annual self-assessment to this. I wanted to delete some text, but I guess I didn't have focus in the text box, and hit back. The form was created by an awful website (PeopleSoft/Oracle), so hitting forward didn't bring my data back.
Sure, it was just 20 minutes of work. Sure, a better website would have had the fields autosaved, or at least not have broken the browser autofill. Sure, I could have written it in a different program and then pasted into a browser.
But seriously, that should never happen. Not like that.
Backspace sure is an unusual navigation choice these days, and perhaps wouldn't make sense to code in new software. But in browsers, backspace to navigate back is expect behaviour.
This isn't the first time the Chrome or Chromium teams have made sweeping changes based on usage stats, pissing off the minority who use those features and pushing ever closer to a browser with only the lowest common denominator features that everyone uses.
In any event, I use backspace to navigate back all the time, so this is sure to annoy me to no end. Especially since I use multiple browsers, and it'll be hard to break habits. Ah well..
As a side note, it's interesting to see how such a small change (which, as mentioned above is even reversible) can trigger such an outcry. I've read stuff such as "I've been using this shortcut for 20 years" or "I don't want an extension"... are those even arguments? Yes, applications should be "user-centred" but the "user" here is a collective of thousands or millions of people with their own incompatible opinions. There is a (very good) reason for this change and I've seen zero achievable solutions that would not imply it.
Vimium is incredible.
The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss.
Their solution: Make it harder to move away?
The actual solution implemented more than a decade ago: Cache history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history while maintaining form contents.
I can understand where they're coming from, and I'd be fine with a browser extension. Hopefully the one a Chrome developer is working on[1] will be available before this Chrome release hits stable.
[1]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...
For you 1% of people that actually use the Backspace key for going back, I'm sure someone will come up with an extension to re-enable it, don't worry.
It's never made sense to me why this behavior was ever added to browsers. The logical choice would have been the left arrow key (since there is a corresponding right arrow).
Without some sort of modifier key, this would come with the same set of problems, i.e. failing to focus a text field while using it to move the cursor would trigger navigation. It's also used to scroll horizontally, so it would break other functionality. Alt + LeftArrow already works.
This is breaking a standard interface. One group of people upon whom it most likely places a burden are those who are likely to have other shit to deal with already. Google ain't mailing out special keyboards to everyone who might need them. I don't imagine you're stepping up to fill that need either.
If there was really a problem with data loss, the better solution would seem to be warning the user before navigating away from the page. Removing a widely-used single-key behavior in order to protect users from themselves seems like a bad prioritization.
It'd be nice if we could still have software that is unashamedly not trying to target some sort of Archie Bunker "low information" user. Even the big Linux distros seem obsessed with making things easy for some hypothetical moron-in-a-hurry, at the expense of actual users who know what they're doing. It's unfortunate, and it seems to be a sort of antipattern that's infected a lot of software design. It wasn't always this way: there used to be an expectation that users would learn to use software, and that like any tool, if misused you could mess things up. Somewhere along the line, we've decided that it's unacceptable to tell users that they need to learn how to use software instead of blindly stabbing at it and expecting it to protect them.
I'm not against sane defaults or warning users before they really do something horrible, but the current trend towards ripping out anything and everything that might possibly be 'confusing' seems to be far overstepping the mark.
Firefox isn't much better, but at least they haven't Nerfed the back button.
Typical myopic power users...
If you've ever lost data and especially don't know why/how, then you know that super sucks and shouldn't ever happen period. Removing this prevents data loss, that's a UX win.
It's bizarre that it's happening in 2016, but better late than never. You still have power user alt/cmd-left so the keyboard can navigate, and if you're super duper keyboard person then you can install one of the vim navigation extensions or use an extension that preserves the backspace.
You say established feature, but I bet if you surveyed something like 20% or less would know about this.
Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...
When using a laptop with a sensitive touchpad, this can get really bad.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CURRENT DEFAULT "BACKSPACE" BEHAVIOR IN MANY BROWSERS:
(this example is not prescriptive, it's just what happens)
At any rate, the GIF shows the current situation. You should watch it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MY COMMENTS:
I actually wrote to this app creator that they should throw up a confirmation window ( like these https://www.google.com/search?q=confirm+navigation&tbm=isch )
but the fact is that the browser is the one that decided to navigate away. Now what's very interesting, is that even in this, HN's, thread we have people saying "Yes!!!" and people saying "No!!!" to the change.
So people who simply have never used backspace for navigation, like me, have many times accidentally touched backspace or thought we were focused on a form, and ended up losing data (because the page didn't throw up a confirmation window after navigating back, and after clicking forward the page is blank again.) While other people, who have no convenient single key they can use to navigate back, have come to rely on it. I'm not sure what the solution is, but here's the current situation so everyone understands it.
We're doing this via a flag so that we can control this behavior should there be sufficient outcry.
oOh dear lord, that's a horrible idea. You make a change to your software to fix a problem that is not caused _by_ your software? If a form is confusing enough that the user thinks they have focus when they don't and ends up losing data then that's an issue with the form, isn't it? Not the browser and not the button.
However, I agree it's a poor solution. They could have chosen to track modification of form fields on the page and display a confirmation dialog when backspace is pressed.
Global Accessibility Awareness Day https://www.w3.org/WAI/perspectives/
Now I wish that the Thunderbird developers also remove or change their single letter shortcuts that are easy to mis-type. E.g. "A" for archive, which creates an undeletable "Archive" folder in your mail account. There's a bugzilla issue for it here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=615957
Forgive me if I do not applaud.
Here's the thing about Chrome... They don't want power users.
Remember when you first switched to Chrome? That sleek little pastel colored window elegantly fast. It worked on most websites. It was notably fast on Gmail, which at the time was the slowest website you spent a lot of time on.
You didn't mind that Chrome wasn't configurable. You might even have thought that it would become more configurable over time.
You were wrong. You were never the target audience.
I once had a infuriating (to me, at the time) argument with a Googler who was responsible for an internal app which performed better in Firefox than in Chrome. He said "Use Firefox!". I didn't get it at the time. He was a power user, all his co-workers were power users, and thus the internal app was only used by power users... They all used firefox! At least for real work... (Pretty sure they all had Chrome on hand for Mail and Maps, etc...) Anyway, the internal app correctly targeted firefox.
Meanwhile, back in time, when Chrome came out, Firefox started hemorrhaging users. Mozilla reacted. Today, it's as fast or faster than Chrome for most sites I use. And it's configurable!
If you are reading this, and don't have the latest beta or Nightly FF installed, you should go do so now! Really, trying firefox after being away from years will make you smile and renew your faith in humanity. :)
But unfortunately, this story doesn't end there...
I think some firefox devs see Chrome as a rolemodel... Maybe they want to compete with Google for those users who are not you! As a small example, I offer this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1118285 Note the posts that are marked "Comment hidden (advocacy)". You can click the [+] to show what was hidden (comments from power users).
There are niche browsers for power users, and there are extensions... But there isn't a mainstream browser for power users because power users aren't mainstream.
I'm just describing the problem (well, I hope!), I'm sorry but I don't have a solution.
Rather then this be the fix they should probably look at the bug thats causing the user to go back when the form element is focused.
Whats next ? take away space bar for moving through the page ?
A about:config thing needs to be present for this to allow the user to switch between what they want. Sure extentions are possible to fix this too but i dont really want a 3rd party extention to re-enable whats a tried and tested keyboard shortcut. Additionally what happens if that dev's account gets hacked and the extention modded for malace ? Or if the dev pulls the thing in a way similar to the node.js module issue a month or so ago.
This part is worrying though:
We have UseCounters showing that 0.04% of page views navigate back via the backspace button and 0.005% of page views are after a form interaction.
Where is that data being gathered from and how?
Additionally what is classed as a form interaction ?
Awesome.
That's from the linked issue, the one that actually made the change.
So, um. What is "UseCounters"? Does this mean that when you're entering text in a form Chrome is registering your keypresses?
Example from literally one minute ago: a cool thing was going on in a Twitch stream and I wanted to hype in the chat, misclicked the chat box so backspace went back to the stream list instead making me miss the moment.
how many users will go to enable it? very few. you shouldn't pollute the settings page with rarely used customisations.
I guess no one told this guy that a standard keyboard has two ALT keys.
Because it's not standard in fairly large parts of the world.
I don't know whether or not the presence of a right Alt or Alt Gr instead is most common worldwide, it seems you do. Do you have a source?
* CAN/CSA Z243.200-92 is a standard keyboard layout. One Alt modifier, one level 3 shift: https://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/images/ti/clavier.gif
* DIN 2137-1:2012-06 T3 is a standard keyboard layout. One Alt modifier, one level 3 shift: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:German-T2-Keyboard-Proto...
* ABNT NBR 10346 2 is a standard keyboard layout. One Alt modifier, one level 3 shift: http://www.windowsintegral.com/wp-content/uploads/Teclado_AB...
I am looking forward to this update.
This is the very definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
edit: Had to type this four times due to accidently going back."
Made my day.
I'm glad the sharing of telemetry pays off in features sometimes.
Looking forward to this update.
In safari, when opening a new tab, the focus is not on the address bar. I have to always to Cmd+L before start typing. The address bar focus works when you don't have a homepage defined (so a blank page), but who doesn't configure a default home page? arrghh
Anyone who thinks this shouldn't die is basically a bad person. It was an affliction, and one of the poorest design choices in history. :-p
Any way to add it back? Maybe an extension?
I've only ever done this by accident.
Backspace key in Chrome browser no longer navigates backward, but instead is limited to its initial and rightful role: deleting the previous character under the pointer (mouse / text cursor).
I swear by His Noodliness I'd ranted on this at G+ some time, though unfortunately since Microsoft Bing Search isn't available on Google+, I cannot actually find shit in a useful fashion.
That said, I applaud this change, thumb my nose at the fuckwits who are bitching about it, and note again the Flaw of Averages: One Size Fits None.
As to the justification of not relying on Backspace for Navigation
I ordinarily take exception to blame-the-user / taunt-the-user practices, and should hasten to explain my own here.
Learning a New Backward Navigation Method is a Temporary Training Inconvenience.
Repeatedly losing Vast Quantities of Newly Composed Content is an Irrevocable User State Loss.
Among the canons of human-computer interface design is this: Thou shalt not fuck with thine users' State.
Which by definition makes those who fail to make this distinction fuckwits. Perhaps only ignorant fuckwits, a curable state, though quite possibly and regrettably stupid fuckwits, a State of Extreme Durability in my experience.
The larger fault is arguably for the lack of a clear stateful separation of editing from _ browsing_ modes in Web browsers. Editing involves creating novel user state which can be easily lost through capricious client behavior, such as, to draw on a randomly selected example, fucking overloading the backspace key with the behavior of "delete my highly considered and Very Important Message to the Univers by immediately and irrevocably moving off this page.
It's with some irony that I note that console-based Web browsers rarely have this problem. The w3m browser, for example, when editing a text field, dumps the user to a local full-powered editor, and in fact defaults to that one specified by the users environment ($VISUAL, $EDITOR, etc.). The result is that a "primitive" browsing tool actually has an exceptionally powerful editing environment.
(At this point, the Emacs users in the room are of course laughing and pointing at me, but they in fact entirely substantiate my claim in doing so. And, my dear good friends, I've given not inconsiderable thought to actually joining you, as it seems that via Termux, a commandline environment for Android, emacs and all its capabilities are in fact available to me, and may vastly surpass the Android applications environment in capabilities. The fact that Viper is a well-established and long-standing component of the Emacs landscape means that the One True Operating System now does in fact have a useful editor.)
Chrome has other utterly unredeemable failures on Android, including an utter lack of ad-blocking capabilities. But for the task of composing and editing, this is a nice touch.
But it does raise one futher point: why is editing via Web tools so abysmally poor?
Despite various deficiencies, the G+ app actually does favourable compared to a number of other platforms, and virtually all Web editable tools. Reddit and Ello stand out particularly. As much as I love the Reddit Enhancement Suite full-screen editor (it's a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome desktop), it's not available on Android. Meaning I've got to jump through Multiple Divers Hoops in order to compose long-form content on Reddit. Android's various content-creation deficiencies make this a tedious process. This accounts for some of my Diminished Output in recent months.
In particular, Firefox/Android has proven Exceptionally Capable at Losing My Shit, at least in memory not exceptionally distant (considering I've owned my present Samsung[tm] Infernal Device[r] only since October last), a characteristic which makes me Exceptionally Leery of Embarking on Enterprises of Extensive Prose Composition within that context.
Given the, shall we say, exceptional advancement of text-composition in other contexts, I find this particular failure mode of the Browser Development Community in General most unpardonable.
</rant_off>
Have a pat on the back.
It's been less than 36 hours since I lost several hundred words of work because of this, so I'm pretty sure the default behavior is "go back" as of the latest stable version (46.0.1).
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action
I made a half-assed attempt to migrate my Windows Firefox profile to Linux a while ago, which probably explains why I'm seeing the Windows behavior on both platforms :(
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".
>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.
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"
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.
I'm an emacs user. If Ctrl-c does something different from starting a chord, I'm gonna have a bad time.