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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of what's going on right now in Chrome:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...

For all of us HN readers, backspace to go back made intuitive sense from the first time we accidentally hit backspace years ago. However, I imagine for every one of us, there are tens of folks who use computers sparingly and get confused when hitting backspace takes them to a wholly different page. In the end, this might make chrome easier to use for the common man at the expense of a tiny performance hit for power users.

I'm a user of Firefox, and have backspace to go back disabled, due to having accidental navigation happen way too many times. When I do want to go back, I can always press alt+left

Problem is that you can't press alt+left with one hand. Backspace wasn't reliable but at least it worked when you tabbed away from any active inputs.

I can.

You can use alt+left with one hand, just use the right hand alt key.

Many keyboard layouts have altgr instead of a right alt key, and it won't work for this.

This is what user-specific settings are for.

Each user-specific setting introduces additional maintenance overhead and rarely used/dead code. Easy to see why they'd want to avoid it.

I have to disagree. I've not dug into customizing Chrome, but creating a mapping for key -> action is pretty much bog standard GUI work, and doesn't require rarely used/dead code. Key presses are captured by the GUI, which maps them to an action. If users want to keep backspace as back, that should be just as easy as letting someone make vi keybindings for navigation.

The Chromium team has a policy about these things and most of them are larger pieces of code (this one is an exception).

Apparently this case isn't special enough to make an exception, which is understandable since you can just use an addon to restore the old behaviour.

I just use Vimium, 'H' is the default shortcut to go back a page. Mind you, Vimium also supports custom hotkeys, so that would be a possible way to get that back.

And it's really good for full keyboard navigation. What I'm trying to get at is that, power users have options.

To me, personally, backspace made sense but even as a power user of sorts I'd say I've used it accidentally more often than not.

Except what they went with is the bad and lazy solution.

Other browsers have already implemented the proper solution, which is to cache form inputs across history navigation, but they simply didn't care enough to actually improve the user experience.

Personally, the amount of time I've spent re-typing data into a browser form because of accidentally pressing the backspace key while a field wasn't focused (usually caused by brushing the touchpad on my laptop) far outweighs the speed benefits I gained from using backspace to navigate back into my browser history over the past 15 years.

However, it would have been nicer for the Chromium developers to allow users to remap key bindings instead of removing the binding and telling users to use an unpublished extension to add the functionality back.

Imagine the outcry if all of a sudden Microsoft decided that the backspace key in Word should no longer work, and suggested that users who wanted the functionality fixed should go download and install a third party plugin.

Backspace is totally useless. Not sure about Chrome, but in other browsers you can use alt+left arrow alt+right arrow, which is more intuitive and harder to do accidentally.

I've lost form content so many times from backspace going back a page (thumb just glances the touchpad to change focus from editable control).

Backspace isn't a navigation function. It's to delete the last character. We have navigation keys they're called cursors.

Glad to see the back of backspace.

I think that's a different issue. The Chromium change was very intentional to work around an otherwise-unavoidable failure mode users would encounter (some pages don't restore correctly if you navigate off of them, and backspace also meaning "delete previous character" meant that having it overloaded as the "go back a page" operator too often led to undesired navigation events).

Incidentally, aren't there already Chrome extensions to change the behavior to what it was originally? [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-as-backf...]

Just learn to use ALT+LEFT ARROW (back) and ALT+RIGHT ARROW (forward).

Backspace was problematic because it was too easy to accidentally activate, plus you'd still need to know about ALT+RIGHT ARROW to go forward again which wasn't consistent.

They were right to remove it. Terrible hotkey.

> plus you'd still need to know about ALT+RIGHT ARROW to go forward again which wasn't consistent.

Or, you know, use shift+backspace, just like you can use shift+space to scroll back up.

Hotkey use is a very habitual and personal thing. Everyone has a scheme that works for them and it's hard to adapt to something else. So why don't modern browsers just add a screen where you can customize your hotkeys?

Like, you know, the entire video game industry has managed to do for decades?

Different use case with different concerns.

For starters, you don't expect to be able to sit down in a public library and have their freely-provided copy of Elite: Dangerous work the way it does at home.

They have an actual reason for not doing this and it makes sense, and they described it https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...

Google has annoyed me in the past with Chrome feature removals (I want my fast profile switcher back!), but this one I agree with.

It's easy to see how people would loose data by accidentally using backspace. I'm fine with Alt-Left and Right click -> Back.

The right click -> back method sounds clunky, but it's actually extremely convenient.

Have you tried Vivaldi? Chromium-based, very configurable (including keys), lots of features, and they are always interested in adding new ones.

I dropped Chrome after Vivaldi came out, but there are plenty of other Chromium-based browsers to try....

Well the most important reason to use Chrome is its unrivalled security track record. Getting it right takes skill, resources and time, and Google is hard to match.

Definitely the first thing I thought of as well. My experience with this change has been so negative I've actually been seriously considering going back to Firefox, all these years later.

Firefox also doesn't support backspace to navigate backwards.

Sure, but my guess is they will either let me remap or have an extension that doesn't look at and control all my browsing data to do it. I haven't looked yet, though, so I might be wrong (I just remember having more flexibility when I used Firefox).

Firefox is currently in the process of changing their extension API to more closely match Chrome's

It's a configurable option in Firefox, and on Windows at least it defaults to navigating backwards.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action

use this oss extension and keep going... https://github.com/j-delaney/back-to-backspace

I'm happy backspace is gone. It's non standard UX behaviour in comparison to other browsers like Safari & Firefox etc.

Better use alt+arrow keys (this works also in all other browsers).

i first encountered this bug^H^H^Hfeature yesterday. thought i accidentally enabled or changed some obscure setting or hotkey.

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