> the backspace key as "back" navigation

That was a ridiculous usability nightmare and was only popular due to muscle memory from IE doing it long ago (it was a terrible decision back then, too).

Good riddance to it, may no one ever again unfocus a form field by accident and wipe out an entire form with a single keypress.

Good riddance indeed! A big thank you from me and my blood pressure to the developers who finally pushed through the removal of that godforsaken nightmare of a human interface feature :)

Agreed, and although I get that patches breaking muscle memory are annoying, the potential downsides to that are so disastrous that the arguments around it puzzle me quite a bit to this day.

In fact, the whole conversation surrounding this issue made me see for that, although hyperbolic, XKCD 1172 [1] actually isn't that contrived...

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1172/

> wipe out an entire form with a single keypress.

That's a bug in the browser caching design, not an issue with backspace navication.

My muscle memory has adjusted to Alt+Left (thanks to their reminder popup.) However, I've moved onto being upset by webcomics that bind the arrow keys without filtering out Alt+Arrows, resulting in an unfortunate combination of history and non-history navigation when attempting to use this shortcut.

See, I hate that reminder popup. Like, "Oh, yeah, we know that you've been using backspace to go back in your web browser since 1997, but we're going to take that away. We're not going to use the functionality for anything else. We're just going to pop up a smug dialog box every time you hit backspace telling you that backspace is deprecated and to relearn this command for no good reason."

The reason is that you can now press backspace on a website with 100% certainty that you aren't going to lose all the state you just spent 30 minutes on filling out.

That's QWERTY-centric. On my AZERTY keyboard, I can't press Alt+left with one hand, because the right Alt key is replaced with an AltGr key which doesn't work like the Alt key. So on Chrome, I have currently no way to go back one page with one hand.

> Chrome is becoming the browser of the masses.

Well it's clearely been targeting the masses since the beginning.

When Chrome first came out it was applauded for things developers and powerusers cared about: a sandboxed multiprocess approach, a fast JavaScript engine, low memory footprint (this is hilarious in 2017), open-source, a task manager, etc.

Remember this guy? [1] It's a 40 page comic book of stuff the masses would never care about.

[1] https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html

ISTR they said they didn't care about browsers, but they wanted to show other browsers how they thought it should be done.. with no intent for long-term investment... But as a true weasel I have nothing to reference.

Chrome was never a power user browser.

The hint is the name: like falling a hairless man "Curly", Chrome had less UI chrome and festures than other browsers when released.

The awesome dev tools were simply because they dogfood well.

You mean "calling" a hairless......

True! Too late to edit now... ditto with "festures" :P

Removing the ability to view the SSL cert details by clicking the padlock was more annoying... Now you need to navigate through "Developer tools".. WTF

I'm almost surprised some of the "power user" features aren't gone already, like search keywords.

It's always been a browser of the masses - and a tool to keep eyeballs on Google properties.

What are the cool kids using these days, I wouldn't mind a change

Pale Moon ;)

It'll support XUL when Firefox drops it.

I've used Tree Style tabs too long to give it up.

UI doesn't constantly change. The UI is pre-Australis. This is one of the reasons I moved to Pale Moon.

In the hopes that you might know something about this: I'm on an attempt to move back to Firefox for various reasons. Tree Style Tabs (and tab unloader) are big reasons for this.

In the past I moved to Chrome because Firefox seemed bloated, but after many (HN) articles arguing that this has been fixed, i decided to give FF another chance.

But today I noticed that despite the fact that Tab Unloader actually does unload tabs, the Firefox process takes 1.5 Gigs on my computer even though pretty much all tabs should be unloaded at this point. It also seems to take longer for FF to show up when I alt-tab to it.

Am I doing something wrong here, or is FF still a bloaty piece of (admittedly) configurable shit? I really don't want to move back to Chrome, but there isn't enough ideology in me to opt for Firefox if it still sucks.

I'm in the same boat. I always used ff even though it's slower. it's better. Last month I ran ff and chrome both clean for 3 days. chrome was faster so I switched to it for two weeks. It's running ok, but I hate it. I hated it before, and I guess that didn't change all these years and this past month. It doesn't even have an option or a way for an addon to remove the x button from the tabs. I hate the way the chrome devs build chrome. It feels like tech-wise chrome runs better. But I will switch back to ff again end of the month. I gave chrome a good try. I am willing to wait 1 second longer every time I visit a website, every day. That's a lot. but at least it will work like I want it. And if it crashes, then I can just restore everything with one click. Unlike chrome that still crashes but I need to two clicks per window to restore everything..

I use Chrome for testing and I'm constantly astounded. Apparently I need an add-on just to open a blank page on browser load, and even then you have to manually remove the about:blank text before entering the first url.

If I'm wrong tell me how.