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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month. Glad to see it go. It's the worst kind of UI modality because it does different things depending on whether you've reached the beginning of the form. I like to mash backspace to clear out a form. Imagine if pressing "CTRL-S" saved if there were edits, but deleted your file if you'd already saved. People who mash "CTRL-S" habitually would be screwed.

It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.

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Well apart from the millions of desktop PCs out there.

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.

Even those often have a mouse with back and forward buttons.

>everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen

No?

> I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month

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".

> Use a browser that will warn you about losing un-submitted form contents before navigating away?

Most browsers don't do this. If you see a warning like that, it's usually triggered by javascript on the web page itself.

Safari added protection for 'unsaved forms' when closing a window/tab in v3, which was released about 9 years ago.

Great. I'll get right on installing Safari on my Ubuntu machine.

I didn't say it's available everywhere I said there is another solution (already working in another browser) besides removing a very long lived keyboard shortcut.

Why swipe around when you could just press a button?

> It's the worst kind of UI modality because it does different things depending on whether you've reached the beginning of the form.

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.)

To this day, I still regularly copy posts to the clipboard before submitting them, because of all the times I've been burned hitting the wrong button and losing it. (Losing the post, not my sanity! Well, that too, actually.)

>It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.

You live in your own little world, don't you?

once a month is not that much...

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