Firefox to block Backspace key from working as “Back” button | Hacker News Reader

Firefox to block Backspace key from working as “Back” button

zdnet.com

23 pointsspapas8235 comments

This is an inaccurate title.

Firefox is not "blocking" the backspace key from working as Back. They're just swapping the default, which is already the default in Linux.

From the article itself:

>Set the browser.backspace_action to 0 in the about:config settings panel to re-enable support for the Backspace key as a Back button.

> which is already the default in Linux.

Thanks for saving me the time to look this up. I was confused for a bit there as I'd never heard of this behavior before.

Step 1: make it a setting

Step 2: change the default

Step 3: remove the setting

The first thing I turn off. It often interacts badly with many single-page we apps where a field loses focus when you remove its contents. Hit the backspace key one too many times, and you navigate back. Not all pages behave this way, but enough do that it's infuriating.

Surprisingly uplifting news. I can't believe in 2021 this was still default behavior. I immediately had flashbacks to all the times I accidentally lost progress in something due to hitting the backspace button, then went through the process of changing the behavior myself.

I've used this feature for decades and have never had any issues with lost progress. In fact, it's the reason I switched to Firefox in the first place, after Chrome removed it. I really don't understand people's trouble with it.

This tone is so irksome to me. It's the "works on my machine" fallacy, but with UX. If people experience a bug or UX problem, it really doesn't matter if it's the "fault" of the software or those users.

It matters if it causes a feature you depend on to be removed for dubious reasons.

Well luckily for you, and I am sure others, Firefox will allow you to re-enable this in your browser once version 86 rolls out. As cited from the article:

Set the browser.backspace_action to 0 in the about:config settings panel to re-enable support for the Backspace key as a Back button.

It's not being removed, the default is being changed. You can still change it, just as you have been able to for some time. I support your ability to use this feature, and I also enjoy firefox because of its customization support, but I think it's reasonable to change the default to match what most people would expect.

Don't people expect backspace at the page level to go back a page, like in the file explorer?

It works great if you only consume content through the Internet, but if you frequently write text in text fields, it's inevitable that one gets tripped up by it. I run into this problem a little uncommonly, but it does happen. Conversely, I haven't used the hotkey to go back since the 90s, so I'm not sad to see it go.

After you go back inadvertently, if you then move forward the content is still there in the text box. No data loss.

Mouse middle button sideway click is bound to back and forth in the pages, I hope this isn't going away.

As long as there’s an option to change it back seems good to me, i’ve used that feature unintentionally more often than intentionally

And like so many things that have been changed but could be changed back with a config option, eventually there will be the inevitable "Well, this has been off by default for X years, keeping the option to turn it back on is a maintenance burden, let's just remove it" phase.

I switched to side mouse buttons a few years back, probably around the time Chrome made this change. It's been great: my hand is on the mouse much of the time. On top of that, almost all of the time I click back, I want to either scroll or move the mouse soon after.

I can't believe I used to move my hand to an out-of-the-way spot on the keyboard to go back a page.

I have this and changing tabs bound to my mouse side buttons, I don't know how people tolerate anything else.

This is the worst behavior to me. Those are precious buttons I want to bind to other uses. Too many times they've navigated me away from what I was looking at when I happened to press them with the browser focjsdd

Ugh. I use this behavior for my air mouse so I can assign "Go Back" to one of the buttons.

Well reading to the end fortunately Firefox will have a configuration to restore this behavior.

Nevermind.

Surely you can assign the button to send Alt+Left? That'd probably make it work in a lot of other applications, too.

Annoyingly, on the Mac cmd-left is the shortcut for "back" in all the browsers (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) but if you happen to have a text box with focus (even the address bar!!), it's the system accelerator/shortcut for "go to the beginning of the line"...

cmd+[ is the standard shortcut you need. Works in browsers, text editors, finder, ...

Thank you! This will save my sanity!

Thank you!

Happy that this remains configurable.

It's not hard to check whether you have the input area focused before hitting it, so the accidental mis-presses I've experienced are pretty minimal.

It's a little crazy to me that having to check that an input field is focused before backspacing is even in the ballpark of acceptable UX.

On the topic of back buttons and Firefox, does anyone know why my Logitech mouse back button work with Chrome but not Firefox...?

The editorialized title could be "Firefox removes most used keyboard shortcut". See the bugzilla comments :)

> The “Backspace” keyboard shortcut on Firefox is by far the keyboard shortcut with highest usage with 40M MAU, well above “Find in page” (16M MAU) or “Page reload” (15M MAU), causing concerns that our users suffer useability issues and data loss issues from hitting this keyboard shortcut by mistake

What makes them think it's used by mistake? These stats certainly don't say anything about that.

Do you genuinely there's several times more MAUs deliberately using "backspace for back" than literally any other keyboard shortcut?

It seems obviously implausible to me.

I'd assume that there is a class of users who never ever use any keyboard short deliberately (because they are not aware or dont care about their existence). Any keyboard shortcut they trigger is pretty much by accident. I have not data how common that is, but I know such users.

That seems to just be majority of users based on that stats listed above, and that backspace is the only one that is trivial to hit when trying to do something else.

It's likely the Firefox developers use more of its shortcuts because they are more familiar with the product and are more interested in optimizing their workflow than a typical user. Exploring, which includes backtracking, is the core of the web browsing experience so I'm not surprised people are doing that far more than, say, searching for a substring.

It's also worth pointing out there isn't a great opportunity to learn the keyboard shortcuts Firefox provides. Traditionally you'd learn shortcuts by seeing them next to menu items, but the menus are hidden behind the Alt key, and many actions simply aren't listed there. For example, "Find Again" / F3 is omitted.

I'm surprised they didn't get the statistics for how many people went forward within 1-5 seconds of a Backspace press to undo it.

It seems they saw that the ratio using Alt+Left (2M) and Alt+Right (0.5M) was different to Backspace (40M) and Shift+Backspace (0.3M). However it makes sense a single key shortcut is more discoverable. The first time it's hit might be a mistake, but the following times might be on purpose.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041377#c27

Yep. The fact that spacebar isn't higher makes me think the backspace could be hit on purpose.

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