Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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You're extremely self-centered and dismissive of other people's experience, I have to say.

The same could be said of the developers who think they're always right.

I'm sorry, but maintaining your little piece of convenience isn't worth denying other users a more forgiving user experience.

Judging by the other comments here, I'm not the only one who uses this shortcut.

You're probably a twenty-something with sharp reflexes.

I'm much older than that. If anything it's the younger generation who are driving most of these unpleasant UI changes and dumbing things down. Reflexes have nothing to do with it. Read carefully, slow down, and pay attention to what you're doing.

What's "not that hard" to you on whatever websites you happen to use may be a significant challenge for older people who are forced to use terribly designed websites/webapps for work or other services.

That goes back to my original suggestion of having a prompt dialog, and making it configurable for those who don't want the "permanent training wheels".

"Judging by the other comments here, I'm not the only one who uses this shortcut."

So what? There's a lot of people who actually lose data due to this "feature". Even if there was more of "your kind" (which I doubt), preventing data loss is more important than slight convenience. You can easily change a setting or a commandline option or install an extension. A lot of other people would need to call tech support for that, because they're afraid they'll break their computer...

"Read carefully, slow down, and pay attention to what you're doing."

For someone beyond their twenties, you're certainly a wise-ass, I have to say.

"That goes back to my original suggestion of having a prompt dialog, and making it configurable for those who don't want the "permanent training wheels"

Your suggestion doesn't work. It would literally break some applications and make others so annoying to use that the prompt would be the first thing users disable, bringing us back to square one.

The underlying problem is unsolvable for a browser vendor. All that can be done is to mitigate it by reducing accidental back-navigation. If that means people like you are inconvenienced, so be it.

I commented on the different points of view of the younger and the older at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729287#11739659 .

> The same could be said of the developers who think they're always right.

Browsers often include telemetry which can answer questions like "how many of backspace presses to go to the previous page were accidents" which may prove them right. While I don't know if that or a similar method was used or not, why do you think they just "think they're always right"? What if they did a proper research on the usability of this change and found you're in extreme minority?

There was a G+ discussion where Chrome devs discussed this. The suggestion of rigging up monitoring to look for this was considered, but the case was seen as so obvious (user-state loss vs. a week or two to adapt to a changed shortcut) that it wasn't considered worth the effort.

See Ojan Vafai's comment(s) here:

https://plus.google.com/+KentonVarda/posts/F1dio2L9XtS

IMO the data above is enough when coupled with anecdotal data. Given that it didn't seem worth investing the considerable engineering effort we would need to gather more data. Although there was disagreement on that point. As Peter said, this decision was only loosely based on metrics. Ultimately it was intuition based on a combination of the data mentioned above and anecdote.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/Z2Fbr67q...

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