I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers."
It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary.
But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated and weird, and only serve to surprise and annoy us. They herald from an earlier age when people were still figuring things out in new UI paradigms. For example, these days, you expect the scroll wheel to scroll up and down in a scrolling view. However, my coworker was changing some project settings in Visual Studio the other day, and he tried to scroll through the settings while a drop-down menu in the settings had focus. It scrolled through the menu options, selecting them, instead of scrolling through the view. He had to cancel the changes he was making and open the window again, because he couldn't remember what was originally selected.
This is the worst kind of surprise. Something you thought was just supposed to let you look at different parts of the interface instead modified the data you were looking at. Backspace to go back is a similar surprise. It's supposed to delete text, but instead it can navigate away from a page entirely, if you are in the wrong state when you press backspace. For the same reason, I'm even getting sick of the old middle mouse button paste, since it's too easy to press when I'm scrolling.
Forward and back navigation are already mapped to alt + left and right arrow. Let's reserve backspace for deleting text. (I'm not happy that it sometimes means "navigate up a level", but that might tell you what kind of computer I had growing up.)
But there are better solutions. Comment #35 in that thread actually provides one:
> The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss.
> Your solution: Make it harder to move away.
> The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents.
Safari does this, for instance, and yes it does happen that I accidentally the whole thing by hitting backspace, but it's OK because I know if I just go forward again, it'll all still be there – fully intact.
I'm going to agree with you. Backspace is a totally weird shortcut for navigation and I can't say I've seen it used anywhere else for "get my back to where I was" outside of a browser (it's almost always escape or some function key or other combination).
Alt/Command+Left/Right Arrow has been my go-to for navigation in the browser for years now, especially since "forward" has no other shortcut.
I appreciate when a product group is brave enough to strip away a traditional behavior to accommodate such a common and annoying case. They knew they were gonna catch holy hell for this one from the small but vocal group of people who use keyboards for absolutely everything and opted for a more user friendly behavior. And I fully believe that people don't know what they want until they're shown it, so I rely on data (common error case) over feedback (vocal backspace users).
Completely agreed. This (hitting backspace suddenly changing the page) is the kind of thing that catches older people totally by surprise and makes them think they have no idea what their computer does or why. Long overdue, but: "Thank you, Chrome developers"
> instead it can navigate away from a page entirely, if you are in the wrong state when you press backspace
This happens to me far too frequently. It's all to easy to mis-click with a track pad (another example of bad HMI), and if you defocus a text box suddenly backspace has a very different effect. Good riddance.
I really understand why TotalBiscuit slams games that have dual-bindings. It works against muscle memory.
I agree with you. The only thing backspace to go back has ever done is make me accidentally navigate away from pages where I am entering data. It's just not ergonomic for my typical use.
Alt-left arrow is harder to type, but it's also harder to mistype. Plus, it's a web browser, my hand is on the mouse when I'm navigating anyway.
> I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view and say, "Thank you, Chrome developers."
While I agree with you, the problem is that keyboard shortcuts aren't completely configurable. If they were, the Chrome developers could just tell the whiners to go pound sand and configure it themselves.
The problem is that the Chrome developers don't want to put in the hard work to make keyboard shortcuts properly configurable. They want to take the shortcut of just removing the functionality and everybody to go away.
Conversely, I'm absolutely infuriated by sites that grab my keyboard focus and prevent me from going back with the key. This is extremely surprising because it's going against well established UI paradigms. Backspace as worked on literally every browser and operating system I've used for over a decade.
The middle mouse button paste is one of my favorite Linux features. When I discovered that nuance, I was shocked that Microsoft never included it by default in any of the Windows systems I'd used throughout history. Having access to two separate sections of the clipboard has proven invaluable to me time and time again.
The difference with that feature and the topic at hand is that, should someone in X/Wayland decide to rip it out, there will be a config file I can easily modify to turn "middle_mouse_paste=0" to "middle_mouse_paste=1" and keep a very precious piece of functionality, indefinitely.
>Backspace to go back is a similar surprise. It's supposed to delete text
Spoken like someone who never used a typewriter. Backspace is not an eraser key, it historically does what it says. Takes you back a space. Making it an eraser key is what was "weird...when people were still figuring things out in new UI paradigms."
Having backspace take you back, may be closer to the original function of the key.
I concur with this. I know about the shortcut, but I've never intentionally used it. Instead, it trolls me a lot when I'm typing comments and I lose them when trying to edit something.
Chrome / Chromium have a habit of making these arbitrary changes that seriously annoy some (arguably small) percentage of their users, while claiming that it makes it simpler / better for everyone else, while explaining impatiently why it's infeasible to make the now missing feature a configuration option.
Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.
I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.
1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and
2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.
No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.
I might be the minority here, but I think that using the backspace to go back is counter intuitive. In my mind backspace is to delete something, and I always worry about that.
This is great news. For some use cases, backspace-as-back is a disaster waiting to happen, for example, in a complex web app used in some time-critical task and that requires occasional deleting of text but can lose state or take a while to reload if you accidentally hit back. If you hit backspace without having a text field focused, the whole thing dies and needs to be reloaded and possibly checked to make sure it's still working right, while hundreds of people are anxiously watching and waiting. I have seen laptops with the backspace key physically ripped out just to prevent people from accidentally triggering its back-button behavior.
Right. The change in context is not clear enough for the average user (Text Field or History) and the consequences are really bad (loss of input text).
Backspace to navigate is bloody hell. I don't know how much work I have lost because all I wanted was to remove a couple of characters. ALT-left arrow!
We're creatures of habit. In this case it's a behaviour that existed for two decades or so. Sure, it doesn't make much sense, but the same goes for various functions of the middle mouse button, depending on context: open new tab, close tab, open new application, close window, scroll, paste. Yet you don't see anyone changing those.
Good. I always set browser.backspace_action to do nothing in Firefox, because this is SO infuriating. You think you have a text field focused but you actually don't (e.g. accidental mouse click removed the focus), you press Backspace and BOOM! suddenly you're on the previous page.
Thank you so much for reminding me of CMD+[ and CMD+]. I use backspace to navigate all the time and was initially really annoyed, but I remember learning that habit, and this is a usable alternative that I will learn in time as well. To boot, I don't think I ever used a shortcut to navigate forward, and now I have a new shiny.
We're humans, people, we can intentionally learn new things.
Thanks for saving me a hunt to find the about:config option.
Worst thing in a demo/presentation to accidentally lose all your inputs and are forced to retype while a) people are watching and b) you might also be recorded.
I'm quite the opposite opinion and use Backspace to go back extensively, because it means that I can browse the web with one hand on my laptop with trackpoint.
If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.
P.S.: Oh and if it's a crappy touchpad making unwanted inputs, then I share your concern (and probably a good time to look at other laptop keyboards; turning off the touchpad on this Lenovo was among the first things I did). But still, they really should make this an option...
"Building an extension for this should be very simple."
Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level? Surely it would remove a lot of unnecessary duplicate code.
"We have UseCounters showing that 0.04% of page views navigate back via the backspace button and 0.005% of page views are after a form interaction. The latter are often cases where the user loses data. Years of user complaints have been enough that we think it's the right choice to change this given the degree of pain users feel by losing their data and because every platform has another keyboard combination that navigates back."
Personally I am shocked that the Chromium team ignored years of user complaints before they decided to fix what their own usability studies found to be a worthless yet painful gimmick.
Though I am a frequent user of backspace in Chrome I'm inclined to agree with their decision. Almost no one is using it and casual users are confused by it.
I'll just wait for someone to implement the feature in an extension.
This is going to sound hyperbolic, I'm sure, but backspace-as-back is enormously important to my browsing experience. When I recently installed Ubuntu I had a small moment of panic when I realized that hitting backspace in Firefox performed some Ubuntu-specific thing rather than navigating backwards (as it does in Windows), but fortunately there's an about:config pref to re-enable the behavior. Just my two cents.
I think this is very good. I can't tell you the number of times I've lost form data by hitting backspace.
For those wondering how, if you do control backspace to erase a word etc igs very easy to miss, especially as you transition between word delete and single character delete.
The other common use case for errors is when u think you're in a field editing and you're actually not, bam, you just lost all your form data.
I also like the idea that backspace is for text editing and not for a second feature such as navigation. For enter yes but not backspace
This feels a bit like how Esc was nerfed over the years in Firefox and others until it essentially did nothing. It used to mean STOP. All sockets were closed, the page stopped loading, and I think way waaay back, even animated gifs stopped cycling and JavaScript timeouts and intervals were cancelled.
Single-page webapps were the death of Esc, it was too confusing to users to have a page suddenly hang because they pressed Esc for some reason and all the XHR connections silently closed. "Stopping" just no longer made sense.
Just going to need to train the old timers on the new key strokes. It is sad though when convenient controls are taken away.
This is most annoying. I have used this for the past twenty years and have not lost form data using it. In any event, chrome seems to remember form contents upon navigating back to a form page.
Thank GOD. So many times I've been filling out forms and sometimes I hit backspace to delete something, and maybe I clicked on a dropdown, but it goes back one page and I lose everything. Not the end of the world, but pretty annoying and I'm glad they're removing this.
Finally! It's about time. I don't know who ever thought having a command that didn't use a modifier key was a good idea -- it's not just about losing form data (even if that's protected against), a webpage can have all sorts of "state" you don't want to lose.
Also, what's so hard with tapping Cmd+Left or Ctrl+Left to go back? It's all I've ever done, incredibly intuitive, and simply to do with one hand (using the right Cmd button), at least on most keyboards I've seen.
Cumulative time wasted using 'Command+[': none.
Cumulative time wasted due to overloading of the backspace key: hours.
Relying on current context to determine the behavior of backspace was a terrible idea from the start. To hell with your muscle memory. Re-learn a shortcut that makes sense, and which will save you time one day, rather than insisting with hacker-machismo that you've never lost data in a form.
If you can fill out a formular field correctly without losing focus, you are not part of Chrome's target audience.
edit: Had to type this four times due to accidently going back.
Hah, that's funny! But also, comment #35 is on point:
> The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss.
> Your solution: Make it harder to move away.
> The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents.
...but seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I've tried to hit "delete" (backspace on mac) to delete something I had selected in a web app and had it navigate back losing my unsaved changes I'd have a couple bucks.
I can't count the number of times I've noticed a typo in a form, hit shift-tab one time too many or few, hit backspace and ended up losing all of the info I filled in. The forward button mostly just leads to "resubmit form data?", instead of bringing me back.
I've personally always used alt+left to go back. I know backspace does the same thing, but the only reason I know that is because I seem to hit more frequently than you'd expect while not focused on a form field causing my browser to go back unexpectedly. I've never lost data, though, it always seems to persists when I go forward.
I can't tell you how many times I've lost data because of backspace! Good riddance.
Now, please also get rid of pull down to refresh in iOS Chrome because that has also lost me data a ton of times as well. I don't even know who uses that feature. I don't need to refresh most pages and if I do there are better ways.
[+] [-] klodolph|9 years ago|reply
It's always easy to tell apart the people who know shortcuts from the people who don't, if you watch them use their computers. Someone with a few shortcuts on tap will zoom around their monitors, switching between mouse and keyboard only when necessary.
But there are a few shortcuts and user interface quirks that are too outdated and weird, and only serve to surprise and annoy us. They herald from an earlier age when people were still figuring things out in new UI paradigms. For example, these days, you expect the scroll wheel to scroll up and down in a scrolling view. However, my coworker was changing some project settings in Visual Studio the other day, and he tried to scroll through the settings while a drop-down menu in the settings had focus. It scrolled through the menu options, selecting them, instead of scrolling through the view. He had to cancel the changes he was making and open the window again, because he couldn't remember what was originally selected.
This is the worst kind of surprise. Something you thought was just supposed to let you look at different parts of the interface instead modified the data you were looking at. Backspace to go back is a similar surprise. It's supposed to delete text, but instead it can navigate away from a page entirely, if you are in the wrong state when you press backspace. For the same reason, I'm even getting sick of the old middle mouse button paste, since it's too easy to press when I'm scrolling.
Forward and back navigation are already mapped to alt + left and right arrow. Let's reserve backspace for deleting text. (I'm not happy that it sometimes means "navigate up a level", but that might tell you what kind of computer I had growing up.)
[+] [-] mstade|9 years ago|reply
> The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss.
> Your solution: Make it harder to move away.
> The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents.
(Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...)
Safari does this, for instance, and yes it does happen that I accidentally the whole thing by hitting backspace, but it's OK because I know if I just go forward again, it'll all still be there – fully intact.
[+] [-] snuxoll|9 years ago|reply
I'm going to agree with you. Backspace is a totally weird shortcut for navigation and I can't say I've seen it used anywhere else for "get my back to where I was" outside of a browser (it's almost always escape or some function key or other combination).
Alt/Command+Left/Right Arrow has been my go-to for navigation in the browser for years now, especially since "forward" has no other shortcut.
[+] [-] dclowd9901|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chirael|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|9 years ago|reply
This happens to me far too frequently. It's all to easy to mis-click with a track pad (another example of bad HMI), and if you defocus a text box suddenly backspace has a very different effect. Good riddance.
I really understand why TotalBiscuit slams games that have dual-bindings. It works against muscle memory.
[+] [-] jandrese|9 years ago|reply
Alt-left arrow is harder to type, but it's also harder to mistype. Plus, it's a web browser, my hand is on the mouse when I'm navigating anyway.
[+] [-] bsder|9 years ago|reply
While I agree with you, the problem is that keyboard shortcuts aren't completely configurable. If they were, the Chrome developers could just tell the whiners to go pound sand and configure it themselves.
The problem is that the Chrome developers don't want to put in the hard work to make keyboard shortcuts properly configurable. They want to take the shortcut of just removing the functionality and everybody to go away.
[+] [-] losteric|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eiriksmal|9 years ago|reply
The difference with that feature and the topic at hand is that, should someone in X/Wayland decide to rip it out, there will be a config file I can easily modify to turn "middle_mouse_paste=0" to "middle_mouse_paste=1" and keep a very precious piece of functionality, indefinitely.
[+] [-] robynsmith|9 years ago|reply
I'm one of those people that types "backspace" and goes back unintentionally way too often.
I've lost form data because of this!
[+] [-] hammock|9 years ago|reply
Spoken like someone who never used a typewriter. Backspace is not an eraser key, it historically does what it says. Takes you back a space. Making it an eraser key is what was "weird...when people were still figuring things out in new UI paradigms."
Having backspace take you back, may be closer to the original function of the key.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Natsu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedd|9 years ago|reply
Evidently the kinds of people that can't be bothered going into the Advanced Configuration Settings page would be confused by an additional item in the Advanced Configuration Settings page.
I never used the backspace button for back (though it's probably what's mapped to my mouse button #8 - I'll know on the next upgrade), but I did get mightily annoyed by two changes a while back, and am always happy to bring them up whenever there's a story about Chrom* devs doing this kind of thing.
1. snap-to-mouse - while dragging the scrollbar, if you move the mouse further than ~80 pixels away from the scrollbar column, the page jumps back to the original location - apparently MS Windows users love this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this, and
2. clicking inside the URL bar selects the whole contents - apparently MS Windows users are used to this feature, but chrome/chromium is the only application I've found on GNU/Linux that does this.
No idea what the defaults are for OSX, and, really, it doesn't matter - these features should be sensitive to extant defaults on whatever desktop environment the browser finds itself running on.
[+] [-] ruipgil|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crzwdjk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotheryou|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iSnow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ygra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electriclove|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatboth|9 years ago|reply
Ctrl/Cmd+[ and ] is the real shortcut!
[+] [-] itslennysfault|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swyman|9 years ago|reply
We're humans, people, we can intentionally learn new things.
[+] [-] r00fus|9 years ago|reply
Worst thing in a demo/presentation to accidentally lose all your inputs and are forced to retype while a) people are watching and b) you might also be recorded.
[+] [-] unlinker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RGamma|9 years ago|reply
If you're accidently clicking on things, maybe learn to use a mouse better.
P.S.: Oh and if it's a crappy touchpad making unwanted inputs, then I share your concern (and probably a good time to look at other laptop keyboards; turning off the touchpad on this Lenovo was among the first things I did). But still, they really should make this an option...
[+] [-] oneeyedpigeon|9 years ago|reply
"Building an extension for this should be very simple."
Why on earth isn't there just a generic keyboard-shortcut preference where I can control every possible browser action and its associated keyboard shortcut? In fact, why isn't this available at an OS level? Surely it would remove a lot of unnecessary duplicate code.
[+] [-] dandare|9 years ago|reply
Personally I am shocked that the Chromium team ignored years of user complaints before they decided to fix what their own usability studies found to be a worthless yet painful gimmick.
[+] [-] ChrisArgyle|9 years ago|reply
Though I am a frequent user of backspace in Chrome I'm inclined to agree with their decision. Almost no one is using it and casual users are confused by it.
I'll just wait for someone to implement the feature in an extension.
[+] [-] kibwen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FollowSteph3|9 years ago|reply
For those wondering how, if you do control backspace to erase a word etc igs very easy to miss, especially as you transition between word delete and single character delete.
The other common use case for errors is when u think you're in a field editing and you're actually not, bam, you just lost all your form data.
I also like the idea that backspace is for text editing and not for a second feature such as navigation. For enter yes but not backspace
[+] [-] EdSharkey|9 years ago|reply
Single-page webapps were the death of Esc, it was too confusing to users to have a page suddenly hang because they pressed Esc for some reason and all the XHR connections silently closed. "Stopping" just no longer made sense.
Just going to need to train the old timers on the new key strokes. It is sad though when convenient controls are taken away.
[+] [-] gjvc|9 years ago|reply
Leave my muscle memory alone please.
[+] [-] pfarnsworth|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spo81rty|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|9 years ago|reply
Also, what's so hard with tapping Cmd+Left or Ctrl+Left to go back? It's all I've ever done, incredibly intuitive, and simply to do with one hand (using the right Cmd button), at least on most keyboards I've seen.
[+] [-] djwbrown|9 years ago|reply
Relying on current context to determine the behavior of backspace was a terrible idea from the start. To hell with your muscle memory. Re-learn a shortcut that makes sense, and which will save you time one day, rather than insisting with hacker-machismo that you've never lost data in a form.
[+] [-] dhd415|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mstade|9 years ago|reply
> The problem: Moving away from a form can result in data loss.
> Your solution: Make it harder to move away.
> The correct solution: Cache tab history completely and make it easy to move forward and backward in a tab's history by reusing cache and maintaining form contents.
(Source: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608016...)
I never have this problem in Safari, and I use backspace all the time for navigating back.
[+] [-] itslennysfault|9 years ago|reply
...but seriously, if I had a dollar for every time I've tried to hit "delete" (backspace on mac) to delete something I had selected in a web app and had it navigate back losing my unsaved changes I'd have a couple bucks.
It's rare, but it's annoying when it does happen.
[+] [-] nikanj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jneal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman|9 years ago|reply
I can't tell you how many times I've lost data because of backspace! Good riddance.
Now, please also get rid of pull down to refresh in iOS Chrome because that has also lost me data a ton of times as well. I don't even know who uses that feature. I don't need to refresh most pages and if I do there are better ways.