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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.

And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason.

Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisance on lots of websites. sometimes when I try to do it a shitty pop-up shows up with "post this text you've just copied to FB/Twitter" or the app just re-directs me to somewhere else. It reminds me of the Flash-based websites from around 2002-2003, when they were all the rage.

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> And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now.

Use the basic HTML version. It's worse in a few ways but better in most others. Including speed.

'Back with backspace' was changed to CMD+left-arrow assumedly because a simple backspace can change the page unexpectedly for someone who thinks they are in a text field.

'Back with backspace' has been standard in the Windows file manager for as long as I can remember. Given that the file manager was the moral precursor to the browser of today it would have been nice to retain it.

Back with backspace!

Actually, it didn't go back on Windows XP. After using Windows 7 for 4 years, I am still not used to this 'new' behavior.

I sit corrected, thank you.

I know the reasons, I just think they're stupid. They've replaced one simple key-press with two non-intuitive ones. On my keyboard I have to move both my hands down in order to press the 2 keys, the backspace key was very easy to reach without moving my hands.

On top of that I actually have no "CMD" key on my keyboard, I have a "Ctrl" key which I assume is the same as "CMD" (I also have a key with the Windows logo which I had assumed it was the CMD key, I was wrong). KISS has gone out of the window long ago.

Alt + left arrow still goes back on ff and Alt + right arrow goes forward. It's been that way for quite a while.

The outlook Web app on the other hand sometimes blocks backspace from deleting a character, presumably to stop you inadvertently jumping back from inside a text field. This is only "on" when inside a text field in the first place, so if MS could do it, I don't see why Google's better engineers couldn't.

I've lost so many posts from hitting backspace without realizing I didn't have the input box focused I'm more than happy with this trade off.

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