"Do you want to install "backspace for chrome?" This extension can;

See all your data on all websites

cant wait

I built an extension that replaces the backspace feature and is open source (so you can install it yourself and check the code).

Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/back-to-backspace/...

Source: https://github.com/j-delaney/back-to-backspace

They really don't like preferences. I remember before Chrome's new preferences page it seemed to have many more options. I called them out on a few important ones disappearing and the answer was always "Not many people use those, and they confuse new users".

For a long while it was impossible to view TLS cert information on Chrome Mobile. One day they just disabled the UI for it. Too confusing for new users if they stumble in there.

Same thing with Firefox. It's really frustrating. The options are incredibly sparse. I feel like there is a complete lack of creativity on the part of browser developers are to features that it'd be nice to have

At least Firefox has about:config, and everything can be changed there.

Chrome has chrome:flags but it's not as useful (mostly about turning ON new experimental features than restoring established behaviour). And with both cases, you can't rely on it being there at the next mi or update..

woah.. didn't know about that. It's a monster list of exposed internal variables? Talk about inaccessible...

MozillaZine has some documentation describing many of the about:config preferences:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config

Any user who knows enough to know what he is doing on that page already knows about it.

Firefox still has Ctrl-Q to close the current window, which is right next to Ctrl-W to close the current tab on a English keyboard. This is the first extension I install: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-ctrl-...

Dumb.

In OS X, I always map cmd-q to the system-wide accessibility feature for zoom in. Then change the zoom factor to 0x. It effectively neuters cmd-q.

I map CMD+Q to "Hide Others", which is pretty harmless and doesn't affect the current application.

Ah, yes. On OS X, Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W (well, their CMD equivalents) are system-wide and it drives me crazy if I hit Ctrl+Q by accident, or that devs prompt to quit because of how easy it is to accidentally press it instead of W. I'm so glad that tabs and state reload in pretty much every app I use these days...

On OS X, go to the Chrome menu, select "Warn Before Quitting". This makes it so you have to hold Cmd-Q to exit. No more accidental closing.

This should really be a global setting in OS X. I find myself accidentally hitting Cmd+Q all the time, not just for the web browser.

A while back while looking for solution to this, someone told me a way to map splat-Q to "invert video," which is a great way of training yourself out of hittig splat-Q.

For quite a few users, OSX's entire concept of "quit the currently-active application" is downright archaic.

Do you no longer quit applications in [your operating system]? What's the alternative?

Neither Windows nor Android have a (generally-used) concept of quitting an entire application at the user interface level. You can force-quit a process, but that's a rarely-used feature intended primarily for debugging purposes (and accessible through a side-channel; Process Explorer for Windows, app settings for Android). Some applications implement such a concept, but they're generally "single-window" apps, where closing their sole view is equivalent to closing the entire app (games usually fit this category).

Nowadays, you can generally trust your OS to page an app in and out and devote no resources to it if the resources aren't needed. Quitting an app is for misbehaving apps, which isn't assumed to be the common case.

Install enough RAM to run every application on your system, simultaneously, without swapping...? I guess there's that.

I am surprised Apple hasn't encouraged users to do that, come to think of it.

That's the thing... from an architecture level, a modern Mac can already handle this. The fact that an app can have zero windows open (or minimized) but can be brought to foreground to interact with an app-level menubar attached to no window can be thought of as a bit of an anti-feature, depending one one's point of view.

For my work laptop, the same ~6–8 apps are always running. No need to quit anything ever.

At home, where I do a wider variety of things (coding, photography, video stuff) I do quit apps, but there's still a baseline of ~2–3 apps (Chrome + Music + one more) that are always running, which I would guess is pretty typical for most users.

In Dvorak, CMD-T and CMD-W (K and ',' in QWERTY) are a nice middle-finger curl pair on the right hand. Far away from Q. Easily paired with a right-thumb press of CMD. Strange to remember that two of my easily most-pressed keyboard shortcuts are in different (and I'd say worse!) positions for the vast majority of people.

Here is an old Firefox bug requesting this feature. There is a browser.showQuitWarning pref, but it doesn't seem to work for me.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565567

You can also fix this with "browser.showQuitWarning = true" in about:config. It still instantly quits with only one tab open, but so would Ctrl-W.

"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?"

There is one, on KDE level. Any KDE app has generic-looking hotkey remapper under settings menu. It just works.

It is also available on OS X in the Keyboard prefpane; so long as it's a menu item, it can get a shortcut.

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Application Shortcuts -> [+]

> "Building an extension for this should be very simple."

Which is then followed, amusingly, by a developer who has tried to do it saying that in fact, it's not that simple (without ridiculous permissions).

But now it seems to have turned into a face-saving thing where the Chrome developers won't ever reverse the change or put in a configuration option because to do so would be to admit a mistake in public.

Well, someone figured it out for Linux: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-as-backf...

Yeah, it is an OS level thing on OSX. "Quit Chrome" mapped to cmd-shift-control-something-Q instead, for example. As long as it has a menu item to match on.

Of course it does. For some reason, I always forget about this - maybe it's because it doesn't work in the most-intuitive way (hunt down system prefs pane, enter menu text exactly as it appears), but it's good to know they're trying to make this work. Unfortunately, backspace is one of the keys that can't be used as a shortcut.

> 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?

It turns out this extension does exist. I just used it to assign "shift+backspace" to "Go Back" and it worked.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortkeys-custom-k...

It is chrome team we are talking about. They are the only browser that nukes all of your settings when it thinks they are tampered with and it is impossible to move profile between installations just with copying. And there is no way to disable that :( They force you to use their (useless) cloud sync.