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Comment by strictfp | Hacker News Reader

I get really frustrated with the comments that say "but backspace doesn't do that when you're in a text control". To me thats completely missing the point. Can anyone explain why anyobe would make such a comment? Is it just pedantism with a lack of understanding of the bigger picture? These type of comments drive me crazy, and I only ever see them in programmer fora.

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I think it's because that particular statement is the foundation of the complainant's argument against the shortcut. And for someone who never experiences this failure scenario, the vitriol against the backspace key is nigh on impossible to understand.

I must say I've never had a problem with the feature, and it's been highly useful to me. It must be something of a blind spot to some set of people, because IIRC it has never even occurred to me until now that it might constitute bad UX. In retrospect, though, I can see how it can be problematic.

That's understandable if they use a desktop PC most of the time, and a lot of people fall into that group.

Even with the clever "palm detection" (or whatever it's called) feature that is built into most trackpads nowadays, the very location of the trackpad on most laptops makes it too easy to click on something you didn't mean to. It's much easier to keep the focus in a <textarea> if you just type on a standalone keyboard and the mouse is 14 inches away.

This could be it. I mostly use desktops. When I use a laptop I always use a connected mouse because trackpads are an impediment to me. So to reproduce this frustration you'd need to accidentally move the cursor away from the text control and then accidentally tap the trackpad again to invoke single click and move the focus away. I can see how this might seem like the browser has a mind of its own.

Programmer here, I get pissed off with a lot of things but backspace-in-a-browser isn't one of them, I like it and always have. Maybe I take for granted my intimate knowledge of how html and browsers work. I get much more annoyed with some of the seemingly nonsensical Mac conventions coming from Windows.

> Can anyone explain why anyobe would make such a comment?

Because the original story doesn't add up. If you're typing and press backspace to delete some characters you just typed, without some additional tab pressing, mouse clicking, or Javascript shenanigans on behalf of the website, the browser won't go back in history. That's just a cold hard fact.

If people are getting mad at going back a page by accident, then they are going back a page by accident. It's happened to me, and while I'm still not entirely sure why, I really don't care why. The "Self Destruct" button shouldn't be next to the "Make Phone Call" button.

This behavior has hit me many times because on a laptop accidentally touching the trackpad can lose focus from a text field very easily, so while I am typing a comment/whatever if my thumb or palm drops a bit to touch the trackpad just before I hit the delete key, the browser is suddenly making me angry. Even if no text is lost, focus on doing whatever I was doing is lost.

Because you're not in VIM and text input actions shouldn't be used as shortcuts. Or be consistent and use every letters of your keyboard as shortcuts without Ctrl (or CMD) combination..

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