I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month. Glad to see it go. It's the worst kind of UI modality because it does different things depending on whether you've reached the beginning of the form. I like to mash backspace to clear out a form. Imagine if pressing "CTRL-S" saved if there were edits, but deleted your file if you'd already saved. People who mash "CTRL-S" habitually would be screwed.

It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.

Well apart from the millions of desktop PCs out there.

One thing I like about my venerable x220 is the dedicated forward & backward keys that can also be used to switch buffers in emacs etc.

Even those often have a mouse with back and forward buttons.

>everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen

No?

> I lose form data by accidentally using backspace like once a month

Use a browser that will warn you about losing un-submitted form contents before navigating away?

> It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.

I think we have very different definitions of "everyone".

> Use a browser that will warn you about losing un-submitted form contents before navigating away?

Most browsers don't do this. If you see a warning like that, it's usually triggered by javascript on the web page itself.

Safari added protection for 'unsaved forms' when closing a window/tab in v3, which was released about 9 years ago.

Great. I'll get right on installing Safari on my Ubuntu machine.

I didn't say it's available everywhere I said there is another solution (already working in another browser) besides removing a very long lived keyboard shortcut.

Why swipe around when you could just press a button?

> It's the worst kind of UI modality because it does different things depending on whether you've reached the beginning of the form.

I've never seen backspace act differently once I'd deleted everything. If a form field has focus -- even an empty form field -- backspace doesn't make me lose the page.

(On the other hand, I started this morning hating Chrome for getting rid of the functionality I've used since last century, but I'm now coming to accept it.)

To this day, I still regularly copy posts to the clipboard before submitting them, because of all the times I've been burned hitting the wrong button and losing it. (Losing the post, not my sanity! Well, that too, actually.)

>It's especially pointless now that everyone has a touchpad or touchscreen and can swipe back and forth.

You live in your own little world, don't you?

once a month is not that much...

I actually find Google search annoying to use because the search box hijacks backspace.

I'll search for something, decide to go back, and now I'm deleting my search term instead. And the fact that Google searches based on what's in my search box (without having to hit enter) I've actually "lost" search results that way.

Luckily, there's an extension which fixes this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reclaim-backspace-...

I'm an avid backspace-as-back user, so I went searching for a solution as soon as they introduced focus-stealing.

I would expect the opposite behaviour to be annoying though, I've "lost" searches by hitting backspace and unexpectedly going back when I thought I selected the URL bar and waited to delete what was inside. Try to use alternative shortcuts rather than the overloaded Backspace.

I'm pretty sure it was Internet Explorer that started this horrible, terrible user interface fiasco.

Backspace (despite the name) is for deletion, should only be for deletion, and avoids confusion by only being for deletion. Period.

I don't see what's so hard about control/command-leftbracket or left arrow or whatever you want to assign to "go back". At least you won't accidentally wipe a form.

Anyway, this isn't about you or me, as someone else said, because forward state could be theoretically preserved. The problem is the 99% of "regular people" who will hit Backspace, not realize that they DIDN'T just lose their form and can just hit Forward again, and will redo the work and get frustrated.

I think I use backspace about half the time and cmd-left (osx) the other half. I quite like the cmd-left/right because of the symmetry; as far as I know, there is no backspace equivalent for forward.

What's still really annoying is that cmd-back doesn't work if a text input is focussed, so navigating back through several pages becomes a game of repeated cmd-left, interspersed with left clicks on a 'non-active' part of the page, or a series of TABs to leave all inputs.

Shift backspace goes forward

So it does. Presumably, not for long, though.

Shift-backspace is for going forward, I use it all the time

I use Cmd-[ on OSX, and it works regardless of focus.