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Comment by floatboth | Hacker News Reader

Good. I always set browser.backspace_action to do nothing in Firefox, because this is SO infuriating. You think you have a text field focused but you actually don't (e.g. accidental mouse click removed the focus), you press Backspace and BOOM! suddenly you're on the previous page.

Ctrl/Cmd+[ and ] is the real shortcut!

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⌘←→ too... Not sure why there need to be so many back button shortcuts. Glad they removed backspace.

Yes, and for what it's worth, I feel Space to page down is another oddball one. I guess it's for the supremely lazy who don't want to have to move their finger to the Page-Down key.

Call me supremely lazy, but I use the spacebar all the time (Thinkpad), since my thumb already rests on it and it's so big that I can't miss it. I even prefer it over scrolling.

Page-Down means I have to almost move my hand away from the keyboard (middle finger to the top right corner, can't hit it with other fingers because display) -- that feels like grabbing for the mouse...

The space bar is large and easy to reach. It's also present on some keyboards that don't have a discrete Page Down key (e.g, Apple laptops).

But at least when you are entering text but mistakenly don't have focus on the text box, you can just scroll back up. Where with backspace, sorry bud... gotta enter all that text again.

The laptop I'm using doesn't have a page-down key. I have to contort my hand to press two buttons to hit page down. I can feel the difference in my wrists. It's not laziness, I'm avoiding RSI.

Or those on laptops who don't have those keys. Or those who keep one hand on the mouse and the left on, you know, the left side of the keyboard.

Right hand on mouse, left hand on home row... moving either hand to hit the pgdwn key requires an arm movement from the shoulder. Whereas space is already under my thumb, and if I'm not in a form field, has no other use anyway.

Historically, space is also the hotkey for 'more'.

Because the guys who made Mosiac had no idea what they were doing because everything was so new. At first there was this idea that you'd constantly be going back and forth between pages, similarly to how people used gopher back then. You'd always have your hands on the arrow keys and you'd fly past various pages to find what you wanted. But, of course, terminals didn't really have scrolling, but GUI windows do, so html pages were just written longer and longer and we got used to scrolling down instead of moving between pages.

Recently, Andreeson said that he never expected the forward and back buttons to last this long. He assumed they were temporary measures until something better came along. Nothing ever did it seems.

Worse, I tried MS's Edge browser and found that the spacebar is now a back button. I am completely baffled by this. I am so used to the space bar as a scroll down, I can't think what misappropriation of ideas and user testing must be going on at MS right now to make this change. Its truly bizarre and really killed my faith in MS finally getting browsers right.

Thank you so much for reminding me of CMD+[ and CMD+]. I use backspace to navigate all the time and was initially really annoyed, but I remember learning that habit, and this is a usable alternative that I will learn in time as well. To boot, I don't think I ever used a shortcut to navigate forward, and now I have a new shiny.

We're humans, people, we can intentionally learn new things.

Thanks for saving me a hunt to find the about:config option.

Worst thing in a demo/presentation to accidentally lose all your inputs and are forced to retype while a) people are watching and b) you might also be recorded.

And fuck those who don't have [ and ] in keys of their own.

I'm quite the opposite opinion and use Backspace to go back extensively, because it means that I can browse the web with one hand on my laptop with trackpoint.

If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.

P.S.: Oh and if it's a crappy touchpad making unwanted inputs, then I share your concern (and probably a good time to look at other laptop keyboards; turning off the touchpad on this Lenovo was among the first things I did). But still, they really should make this an option...

I used to, now I just do a right click -> Back. Zero effort with a trackpoint thankfully.

> If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.

Oh, give me a freaking break. You never accidentally click the wrong things? And you never visit a page that "helpfully" plays around with the default focus behavior?

Not with proper input devices (as said, I wouldn't count a regular touchpad as such, given that it's often unsuitably placed/configured) and well, focus is a really crucial UI abstraction, so I automatically pay double attention before I use the keyboard.

In the end I find this Chrom(e|ium) change to be the wrong solution to a questionable problem and a regression (a proper fix would introduce fully/mostly rebindable keys).

How small are your hands if you can't one hand ALT+ Left arrow?

That's an ergonomic nightmare. The right-click->Back approach works too, but some sites like to mess with that and I must watch out to not click the wrong element, so backspace is still my go-to choice.

Not everyone is using a desktop keyboard, or a US keyboard layout.

FWIW, on my laptop, ALT+Left would be a full spread of the hand and I have to move my torso to get the hand in position.

> If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.

Not everyone uses a mouse all the time.

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