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Comment by nothrabannosir | Hacker News Reader

> they inexplicably broke backspace navigating backwards

Hallelujah, praise the lord! He is righteous and he is Good.

Finally. I cannot count the number of times I accidentally hit tab in a form text input, backspace, and lose the entire form. Of course it’s built in JS so state isn’t saved by browser on going forward. Because why use standards? It’s 2017, ain’t nobody got time for functionality.

It got so bad I now automatically open a text editor to write the text in, first.

This was a bug bear of epic proportions. Good riddance.

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Meh, backspace-for-back should not fire when a input element of any type (i.e. including anchors) have an active focus. Also, "forward" should restore this state but since it's in JS perhaps the aim of your complaints is misplaced and should direct to the site owner.

It should at least be opt in (not sure where the setting is in Chrome).

That was the standard navigation method of every webbrowser for decades, not a bug.

Just because something is and has been standard for a long time, it doesn't make it good UX.

It sucks that it's gone - it took me months to retrain my muscle memory to stop using backspace - but I've definitely accidentally navigated back from a form before.

I've adjusted. It's a hard decision but imo the right one. Future generations shouldn't have to deal with this.

To anyone reading who needs a keyboard-based substitute: Alt+Left Arrow.

[Alt]+[←] requires two hands, though: One to press the [Alt] on the far left of the keyboard, one to press [←] on the far right of the keyboard.

That’s horrible.

I typically use a vim-like set of keybinds when possible, so for me it's something like shift-H or g,h.

That's weird, because I press it all the time with one hand. I don't even reliably use the same hand. Does your keyboard not have an Alt key to the right of the space-bar?

On international keyboards, there is no right alt key, but instead at that place is [AltGr], which triggers both [Alt] and [Ctrl].

[AltGr]+[M] for example gives μ, [AltGr]+[E] gives € and [AltGr]+[Q] gives [@]. Obviously, [AltGr]+[←] doesn't work.

It's one more of those shortcuts that make it obvious that whoever made the decision only ever used a US Standard keyboard, and never even considered international users. The only decisions even worse are ever using ` (it's a 4 key combo on some international keyboards, and not at all existing on others), or ~ \ [ ] { } ( ) ; : (all of these are combinations of usually two or three keys on most international keyboards).

As far as I know, using backspace to go back was something from Internet Explorer, which other browsers copied as a concession to users used to it, but only on Windows. I've used Firefox for over a decade, and backspace never went to the previous page for me, even on a new install, so "every webbrowser for decades" is a stretch.

Firefox on Linux has supported it for ages, too. I’ve used it frequently, at least.

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