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Comment by ChrisArgyle | Hacker News Reader

Analysis from Chrome devs here https://codereview.chromium.org/1854963002

Though I am a frequent user of backspace in Chrome I'm inclined to agree with their decision. Almost no one is using it and casual users are confused by it.

I'll just wait for someone to implement the feature in an extension.

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If it is implemented in an extension, would it require the "Allow access to all of the web sites I visit" permission?

I'm always a bit apprehensive to enable those sort of extensions.

Wait someone to implement it then extract source or implement it yourself, but rather than going through the store, add the code you inspected/wrote to the browser by enabling "Developer mode" in the Extensions (chrome://extensions/) then clicking "Load unpacked extension".

This would be a very simple piece of code so getting no updates is actually better for security in this case IMHO.

Chrome now disables it unless it's in the app store:

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969?hl=en

EDIT: And prompts you to disable it at startup if it's unpacked.

Well, yes, having a popup[1] on startup can be less or more annoying than submitting the thing to the Chrome store yourself depending on how often you restart your browser.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/qX8bNcl.png

That fucking popup is the thing that finally drove me to drop Chrome and go back to Firefox on my home PC. Of course, now Mozilla is starting to go all in on extension signing too, so the joke's on me.

Waterfox aims to get rid of some of these annoyances: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/.

I use Backspace back quite a bit myself and was confused when it stopped working but I think it's the right decision to remove it. I'll just switch to Alt-Left rather than switch to an extension (and endure the week or two of annoyance while I adapt).

I actually use Page-Down instead of space which I suspect makes me weird but I feel like Space should be next on the hit-list as long as they are cleaning up confusing shortcuts.

Please don't give them ideas. Backspace they can have because it causes real problems with forms, but Space never hurt anybody.

No seriously, if any Chrome devs are reading this, I will go back to Firefox tomorrow if you break Space.

From that codereview site: "We're doing this via a flag so that we can control this behavior should there be sufficient outcry."

So it would be hopefully possible to re-enable it via chrome://flags or something like --enable-backspace…

Edit: Or not –– "We ended up not having a flag for this. Even if we had it, it would only have been in place for a single release."

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