Anyone want to place bets on how long till Firefox copies them?
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 :(