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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

Malicious extensions are a likely culprit. This is the ultimate irony of the whole WebExtensions debacle; browser vendors wanted to stop the extensions from interacting with the browser because maintaining that interface is work, so now the most trivial extensions will request full access to all websites so they can inject scripts. To bring back "backspace navigates back" I have an extension that needs just that.

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Needing javascript that embeds in every page for basic mouse and keyboard behaviour is insane. No clue why they decided it should be the only viable option.

It isn't intended to be. But supporting the old APIs meant that they had to have Microsoft levels of backwards-compatibility.

• You want to refactor XUL so it doesn't duplicate features of HTML5? Whoops; you broke all the extensions.

• You want multi-threading? What a shame; that API over there assumes it'll always be called from the main thread.

• Update that database table's schema to store more data? Bah. Make another table, or you'll break extensions

When every implementation detail is part of your interface, bad things happen.

Fine, XUL had to go. But where is the replacement? How many more years should we expect Mozilla to need to implement configurable bindings? It doesn't even need to be extension-accessible, just give users a tab in the preferences menu like damn near any other application has been doing since the dawn of GUIs.

Do they even have one engineer working on this?

Considering they fired half the people working on this, probably not.

I am very much used to alt+left arrow to navigate back, in the unlikely case you were not aware of this shortcut and if you would like to drop this extension for whatever reason.

The point of the "backspace navigates back" extension is that alt+left is not how people were used to going back on websites.

On Firefox you can go to about:config and set 'browser.backspace_action' to 0.

The number of times I have been bitten by backspacing when I thought I was in a web form and in fact navigated to a previous page is high.

I sympathize with the other user having to change a default setting or install an extension, but I'm glad that the felt behavior changed.

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