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galacticpony

That's not the problem. What you're talking about already works.

There's numerous things that can go wrong, here's two common ones:

1) The page you are going back to is a login prompt, which immediately redirects you, overwriting your "forward" state.

2) Javascript. Everything can happen. Everything will happen. Your worst nightmares will come true.

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Yes, saving input won't be possible. But generally, applications that accept user input and cannot save it for some reason ask for confirmation to lose it, so users won't lose it accidentally. Take a text editor for example, you can open it and close it and it won't bother you, but if you write a few words and try to close it, it will ask you whether you are ok losing the data. This is what users expect nowadays. Chrome team somehow doesn't understand/recognize that and instead of fixing the problem in a generally accepted way, tries to rearrange the interface to have fewer accidents, breaking UIs too much in the process and pissing off a lot of users. And that's bad.

"But generally, applications that accept user input and cannot save it for some reason ask for confirmation to lose it, so users won't lose it accidentally."

You'd think they do, but they don't, at least not all of them. The problem isn't the properly designed webapps, it's the improperly designed ones. That's what you somehow don't understand/recognize.

Also, the problem with the redirect happens on a certain popular bulletin board software that works without Javascript (and therefore doesn't provide such a prompt in the first place).

I was talking about desktop applications, not webapps, because web browser is a desktop application and is expected to behave like one. Webapps don't have to do anything.

I don't understand your point, then. We are talking about web apps. Is Chrome supposed to alarm you when navigating away from any site with form input? How would it know if your changes are unsaved or not? (It can't)

It can and they know how to implement it. There is a pretty clean distinction of where the user can input some data.

The only thing it could do is alarm you for navigating away from any webpage that has any form that has ever had input put into it. Also, the website could intercept the "go back" event for some purpose. Should the browser fire an alarm then, as well? Either way, it would be a terrible user experience.

There's no notion of "unsaved" changes. There's the notion of form data that hasn't been submitted, which is entirely different. Many web apps don't use "submit" at all, ever.

Chrome might not be able to, but the website can, surely? Why not leave it to developers to properly handle state within their application (e.g. by using history and 'beforeunload' functionality) rather than second-guessing it at a browser level?

Then the problem would ALREADY be solved, because all developers would already be properly handling state within their application instead of second-guessing it at a browser level. But they don't.

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