I'm shocked they reacted to the complaints at all. Chrome is infamous for painful UX blunders that Google refuses to acknowledge, let alone fix. Mouse thumb buttons are permanently bound to forward and back, the only workaround is to use your mouse's driver or a third-party input mapper to bind them to something else. The Android version cannot re-order tabs (or use extensions. Seriously.) The Google product forums are a sad wasteland of people with simple problems shouting into the void. Here's a thread from 2010:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/R-wESj...

These advanced power users want the unfathomable ability to install Chrome in a different directory. The only solution involves downloading the Windows "Junction" utility and creating a symbolic link. Surprisingly, an actual employee (uh, "Googler," whatever that means) deigns to appear, but only to inform everyone that there is no solution except to download Chrome from Google Pack. The Pack version won't let you pick a location either, but its default is different, or at least it was until Google Pack was discontinued.

You know what, I think I'm just going to see how Firefox has been doing. I can't even remember why I switched.

Probably performance. So yes, do go check out FF again. ;)

Allowing extensions on mobile would deprive them of valuable mobile advertising revenue. uBlock Origin works great in Firefox for Android.

Is there a mobile browser that does allow extensions?

Firefox on Android. Been using it for a few days with uBlock origin and it seems quite worthwhile.

In general I've found that FF have been proactively fixing their perf, memory and usability stories. With exception to the rare occurrence such as this, Chrome has been on a steady decline.

Your usability study methodologies are worthless if they conclude that "backspace back" is worthless.

It's the first thing I'm always enabling on every new Firefox installation since they disabled it by default several years ago.

And with sufficiently large user base, even 0.04% means "lots of people being pissed off now".

It's a tradeoff. There are already keyboard shortcuts for 'previous page' and there will be extension support to re-add 'backspace as previous page', it just won't be on by default.

If you were a drugstore and had a drug that was functionally identical to aspirin but caused day-long projectile vomiting in 99.96% of people who took it, would you think it was a great idea to hide the aspirin in the back and give the drug that is almost guaranteed to cause harm to someone as the default?

IE compatibility across platforms is why most if not all browsers behave this way. And even then, it probably started with Netscape or actually it probably pre-dates the graphical web, I think Lynx uses it to go back. I remember being frustrated by this "feature" as late as 1997 on dialup.