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Comment by chuckadams | Hacker News Reader

> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key?

Because people were triggering it by accident all the time. Firefox and Safari don't navigate back on backspace either.

Enter only auto-submits if there's a visible submit button or if there's just one input, and that behavior goes back as far as I can remember.

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Yeah, that wasn't an attempt to remove keyboard navigation, that was fixing a painful error in keyboard navigation.

Yes it was an error because backspace does function as a backspace when a text input field has the focus. Making something that should be muscle memory context-dependent.

It should have been Ctrl-Backspace or something.

I'm surprised the person responsible for <backspace> mapping to Back navigation didn't mandate that <del> would be super awesome for Forward navigation.

Nono, that should close the window xD

right now, i cannot even enable Backspace = go back on Edge. I am forced to use Edge on my work computer and i hate that this feature is gone. Not disabled, just gone.

About enter to auto submit, i've been running into this problem more often where some web frameworks just ignore the Enter key. There is a submit button, but i cannot trigger it via the enter key.

Is alt-left to go back a bad keyboard shortcut for you? It's what I use.

It's also far less likely to be accidentally typed while trying to fill in a form and fumbling the tab navigation.

Every small feature is used by some subset of users, but if you don't trim your software from time to time then feature creep will eventually make it incoherent. Yes, it involves even small details like this one. I don't think learning another hotkey is a big problem, and anyone using keyboard navigation on the web should generally be at least aware of a ton of existing Vim-like navigation extensions (and even browsers)

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