This is most annoying. I have used this for the past twenty years and have not lost form data using it. In any event, chrome seems to remember form contents upon navigating back to a form page.
Leave my muscle memory alone please.
Leave my muscle memory alone please.
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.
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.