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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

IIRC backspace-to-go-back was not killed because of instant search, it was killed because users kept going back when they didn't mean to, because they thought they were typing in a text box and weren't.

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There's still e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-to-go-ba... but IMO it's ridiculous to not just make this an option. Hide it in a flag. https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/14/restore-backspace-shortcu... they decided that 400k users was not enough to warrant a flag for.

But hey, cmd+q to quit immediately, with "warn before quit" off by default is a great idea. No need to look at that one or make it possible to change the key bind. Never mind that it's one key away from cmd+tab.

This is the kind of stuff you get when you make decisions based on A/B testing.

There's a hack to sort-of disable the keybind: Go to chrome://extensions/ and open "Keyboard Shortcuts" (bottom right). Pick an extension you don't use anymore (or install one), and set the shortcut for "Activate the extension" to cmd+q or ctrl+shift+q.

Yes, it was killed for this reason. Singular hotkeys that drastically alter state are a horrible UI design decision. When commanding, controlling, or altering a program, the trigger should be an explicit action. One accidental key stroke should not be catastrophic.

That's right, but it incidentally also meant google saw it fit to highjack backspace to not mean go back in any browser when on google.com, and just use it to remove characters from the search box, regardless of whether or not it's focused. The end result is that using backspace in browsers that do support it, such as safari, is now broken whenever google is part of that tab's history. If instant is removed, then there's little need to keep this bit of annoying code I'd think.

I probably could have been clearer in my original comment, my apologies.

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