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Google Chrome To Disallow Backspace As a 'Back' Button (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Google Chrome is going to stop people from accidentally deleting everything they've been doing. A future version of the app will stop the backspace button from also functioning as a "back" button. The change has already been rolled out in some experimental versions of the app, and has upset some users. Developers have said that the feature is only being partly enabled for now, in case there is "sufficient outcry" and it needs to be rolled back. People regularly press the button thinking that they're deleting a word from a form, developers said, but then find that they weren't actually typing into that form and so accidentally go back, losing everything they've done.
This one actually seems like a good design decision.
On pc the backspace and delete buttons both exist and they work exactly as they should. Darned if I care what apple does.
On chrome I also see back, forward and refresh/stop just fine.
However the problem with backspace going back is that if you are typing in a textarea and you hit backspace it deletes your text (which is what you want). However if you tab to another control that is not text editable and you hit backspace you have now gone back a page and lost what you where entering. It violates all kinds of UI principles.
Backspace to go back is just a bad UI and fixing it should definitely be done. There is no dumbing down involved.
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It was dumb to map backspace to back anyway. With Internet and browsers dominating existence, keyboards should be redesigned with common browser clickies built in and separate from editing keys.
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And thus the wheel of pain spins full circle. Mainframe terminals have always worked this way. The terminal is sent a non-web form, the user enters some data in fields with Tab and Return serving only and always to move the cursor around. Once you're done, there was a separate "Xmit" key to post the form.
Form submission was always explicit, and entirely compatible with high-speed touch-typists.
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Well, no, that's not why that's there. The reason 'flags' exists is because chrome doesn't branch. Any features that are in development go right in the main branch, so there's no costly merging. It has basically nothing to do with UI concerns; it's a result of the dev process.
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