It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back shortcut (2012)

Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by Mithaldu on Saturday August 20, 2016 @07:50PM (#12328826)

This is being wrongly treated as a binary choice of:

  1. Disable the behavior.
  2. Let it remain, do nothing else.

Meanwhile the actual problem is being ignored completely, which is:

  Form contents are discarded on history traversal,
  even at reasonable depth.

The correct solution is to do what other browsers have successfully implemented already:

  3. Retain form contents on history traversal.

That way people who accidentally go back, can go forward again and keep all their input.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by viraptor on Saturday August 20, 2016 @08:42PM (#12328950)

Webapps are too complicated to have this working reliably these days.

Imagine a website with a support chat generated by js extending from the side. Would you expect going forward/back to this page to restore your chat state? I can come up with a number of reasons for yes and for no. But the best option in this case is: make accidentally going away from that chat session very hard.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by galacticpony on Saturday August 20, 2016 @08:04PM (#12328866)

That's not the problem. What you're talking about already works.

There's numerous things that can go wrong, here's two common ones:

1) The page you are going back to is a login prompt, which immediately redirects you, overwriting your "forward" state.

2) Javascript. Everything can happen. Everything will happen. Your worst nightmares will come true.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by zzzcpan on Saturday August 20, 2016 @08:31PM (#12328930)

Yes, saving input won't be possible. But generally, applications that accept user input and cannot save it for some reason ask for confirmation to lose it, so users won't lose it accidentally. Take a text editor for example, you can open it and close it and it won't bother you, but if you write a few words and try to close it, it will ask you whether you are ok losing the data. This is what users expect nowadays. Chrome team somehow doesn't understand/recognize that and instead of fixing the problem in a generally accepted way, tries to rearrange the interface to have fewer accidents, breaking UIs too much in the process and pissing off a lot of users. And that's bad.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by galacticpony on Saturday August 20, 2016 @09:05PM (#12329004)

"But generally, applications that accept user input and cannot save it for some reason ask for confirmation to lose it, so users won't lose it accidentally."

You'd think they do, but they don't, at least not all of them. The problem isn't the properly designed webapps, it's the improperly designed ones. That's what you somehow don't understand/recognize.

Also, the problem with the redirect happens on a certain popular bulletin board software that works without Javascript (and therefore doesn't provide such a prompt in the first place).

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by zzzcpan on Saturday August 20, 2016 @09:08PM (#12329011)

I was talking about desktop applications, not webapps, because web browser is a desktop application and is expected to behave like one. Webapps don't have to do anything.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by galacticpony on Saturday August 20, 2016 @09:21PM (#12329043)

I don't understand your point, then. We are talking about web apps. Is Chrome supposed to alarm you when navigating away from any site with form input? How would it know if your changes are unsaved or not? (It can't)

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by another-dave on Sunday August 21, 2016 @05:03AM (#12330067)

Chrome might not be able to, but the website can, surely? Why not leave it to developers to properly handle state within their application (e.g. by using history and 'beforeunload' functionality) rather than second-guessing it at a browser level?

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by DonHopkins on Sunday August 21, 2016 @06:39AM (#12330319)

Then the problem would ALREADY be solved, because all developers would already be properly handling state within their application instead of second-guessing it at a browser level. But they don't.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by zzzcpan on Saturday August 20, 2016 @09:27PM (#12329058)

It can and they know how to implement it. There is a pretty clean distinction of where the user can input some data.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by galacticpony on Saturday August 20, 2016 @10:00PM (#12329115)

The only thing it could do is alarm you for navigating away from any webpage that has any form that has ever had input put into it. Also, the website could intercept the "go back" event for some purpose. Should the browser fire an alarm then, as well? Either way, it would be a terrible user experience.

There's no notion of "unsaved" changes. There's the notion of form data that hasn't been submitted, which is entirely different. Many web apps don't use "submit" at all, ever.

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Re:It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back short... by berfarah on Sunday August 21, 2016 @01:15PM (#12331693)

I don't know how you would handle all the banking websites that simply break or log you out if you accidentally go back a page.

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