Hacker News Reader

Comment by adt2bt | Hacker News Reader

For all of us HN readers, backspace to go back made intuitive sense from the first time we accidentally hit backspace years ago. However, I imagine for every one of us, there are tens of folks who use computers sparingly and get confused when hitting backspace takes them to a wholly different page. In the end, this might make chrome easier to use for the common man at the expense of a tiny performance hit for power users.

View on HN

Except what they went with is the bad and lazy solution.

Other browsers have already implemented the proper solution, which is to cache form inputs across history navigation, but they simply didn't care enough to actually improve the user experience.

I'm a user of Firefox, and have backspace to go back disabled, due to having accidental navigation happen way too many times. When I do want to go back, I can always press alt+left

Problem is that you can't press alt+left with one hand. Backspace wasn't reliable but at least it worked when you tabbed away from any active inputs.

You can use alt+left with one hand, just use the right hand alt key.

Many keyboard layouts have altgr instead of a right alt key, and it won't work for this.

I can.

I just use Vimium, 'H' is the default shortcut to go back a page. Mind you, Vimium also supports custom hotkeys, so that would be a possible way to get that back.

And it's really good for full keyboard navigation. What I'm trying to get at is that, power users have options.

To me, personally, backspace made sense but even as a power user of sorts I'd say I've used it accidentally more often than not.

This is what user-specific settings are for.

Each user-specific setting introduces additional maintenance overhead and rarely used/dead code. Easy to see why they'd want to avoid it.

I have to disagree. I've not dug into customizing Chrome, but creating a mapping for key -> action is pretty much bog standard GUI work, and doesn't require rarely used/dead code. Key presses are captured by the GUI, which maps them to an action. If users want to keep backspace as back, that should be just as easy as letting someone make vi keybindings for navigation.

The Chromium team has a policy about these things and most of them are larger pieces of code (this one is an exception).

Apparently this case isn't special enough to make an exception, which is understandable since you can just use an addon to restore the old behaviour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com