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It's still better than the reason why modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome adopted the absolutely terrible backspace-for-back shortcut: because someone on th

It's still better than the reason why modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome adopted the absolutely terrible backspace-for-back shortcut: because someone on the IE team decided to do it 20 years ago, probably because it was a shortcut in Windows' file Explorer as well. https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53176/why-does-backspace-go-back-a-page-this-behavior-is-so-frustrating https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53176/why-does-backsp...

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
This shortcut has cost me so much over the years. Heaven forbid you're typing out a long comment and accidental hit it when the focus is off the text box. Now you hit forward and your text is gone. It wasn't until fairly recently that the browsers kept text box content under these circumstances. In the past you'd just lose it all. Hell, maybe IE still does, but I know Chrome keeps it. So many long winded Metafilter and Slashdot posts lost to the bit bucket... Other times, focus detection breaks randomly and you're in a text box but something happens and, whoops, off you go to the previous page. I don't know how often these early web guys thought we'd be going back, but mapping it to one of the largest and most frequently used keys is asinine. Andreeson recently said that his team always thought of the front and back buttons as half-assed solutions until they could figure out something better. Guess that's probably never going to change.
- skeletonjelly 12y ago
  I feel your pain. For me it was losing many hours worth of written and rewritten letters to girlfriends and friends. Kids these days have no idea how hard we had it with their state captured forms.
hesselink 12y ago
Yes, that's one terrible shortcut. For those on Firefox: in about:config, set browser.backspace_action to 2 to disable it. Made my life better, though it also made me realize I used to use it to go back sometimes.

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

This shortcut has cost me so much over the years. Heaven forbid you're typing out a long comment and accidental hit it when the focus is off the text box. Now you hit forward and your text is gone. It wasn't until fairly recently that the browsers kept text box content under these circumstances. In the past you'd just lose it all. Hell, maybe IE still does, but I know Chrome keeps it. So many long winded Metafilter and Slashdot posts lost to the bit bucket... Other times, focus detection breaks randomly and you're in a text box but something happens and, whoops, off you go to the previous page. I don't know how often these early web guys thought we'd be going back, but mapping it to one of the largest and most frequently used keys is asinine. Andreeson recently said that his team always thought of the front and back buttons as half-assed solutions until they could figure out something better. Guess that's probably never going to change.

skeletonjelly 12y ago
I feel your pain. For me it was losing many hours worth of written and rewritten letters to girlfriends and friends. Kids these days have no idea how hard we had it with their state captured forms.

hesselink 12y ago

Yes, that's one terrible shortcut. For those on Firefox: in about:config, set browser.backspace_action to 2 to disable it. Made my life better, though it also made me realize I used to use it to go back sometimes.