[HN Gopher] Firefox to block Backspace key from working as "Back...
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Firefox to block Backspace key from working as "Back" button
Author : spapas82
Score : 13 points
Date : 2021-01-19 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| teilo wrote:
| 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.
| silicon2401 wrote:
| 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.
| Narishma wrote:
| 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.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| 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.
| Narishma wrote:
| It matters if it causes a feature you depend on to be
| removed for dubious reasons.
| chomp wrote:
| 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.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| 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.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > 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.
| lol768 wrote:
| 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.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| 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.
| SpikeDad wrote:
| 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.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Surely you can assign the button to send Alt+Left? That'd
| probably make it work in a lot of other applications, too.
| 72deluxe wrote:
| 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"...
| joshka wrote:
| cmd+[ is the standard shortcut you need. Works in browsers,
| text editors, finder, ...
| marczellm wrote:
| The editorialized title could be "Firefox removes most used
| keyboard shortcut". See the bugzilla comments :)
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| > 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
| Narishma wrote:
| What makes them think it's used by mistake? These stats
| certainly don't say anything about that.
| esrauch wrote:
| 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.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| 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
| swills wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-01-19 23:02 UTC)