Comment by eldaisfish
12 hours ago
you are arguing against a strawman.
Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use?
Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothing.
> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key?
Because people were triggering it by accident all the time. Firefox and Safari don't navigate back on backspace either.
Enter only auto-submits if there's a visible submit button or if there's just one input, and that behavior goes back as far as I can remember.
Yeah, that wasn't an attempt to remove keyboard navigation, that was fixing a painful error in keyboard navigation.
Yes it was an error because backspace does function as a backspace when a text input field has the focus. Making something that should be muscle memory context-dependent.
It should have been Ctrl-Backspace or something.
I'm surprised the person responsible for <backspace> mapping to Back navigation didn't mandate that <del> would be super awesome for Forward navigation.
Nono, that should close the window xD
right now, i cannot even enable Backspace = go back on Edge. I am forced to use Edge on my work computer and i hate that this feature is gone. Not disabled, just gone.
About enter to auto submit, i've been running into this problem more often where some web frameworks just ignore the Enter key. There is a submit button, but i cannot trigger it via the enter key.
Is alt-left to go back a bad keyboard shortcut for you? It's what I use.
It's also far less likely to be accidentally typed while trying to fill in a form and fumbling the tab navigation.
Every small feature is used by some subset of users, but if you don't trim your software from time to time then feature creep will eventually make it incoherent. Yes, it involves even small details like this one. I don't think learning another hotkey is a big problem, and anyone using keyboard navigation on the web should generally be at least aware of a ton of existing Vim-like navigation extensions (and even browsers)
> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key?
Because alt+left is a better choice? Really f**ing annoying when some dumb javascript removes focus from a text box you're editing and the page navigates back.
I specifically had to disable that via about:config in Firefox ages ago because I pressed it by accident all the time. Often while I was going through a 30 point form, only to then lose all my progress. To be fair, browsers probably should try to not undo progress like that, so you can just go forward again and get right back where I started, but I've never trusted them to actually do that. I've been burned too many times.
I can kinda get that one.
> For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use?
Because web pages don't preserve element focus well, web was originally meant for documents in the first place, not UIs. If you're trying to erase a character and the focus has been lost, you go back in history instead. It's a real existing problem in poorly designed pages, not a nefarious plot to annoy power users by Google, Microsoft, or Mozilla. It was always janky as hell.
Agreed. I'll say the same about accessibility. People really need to test for this more. If your app is not accessible I literally cannot use your app regardless of how useful it might be. This is pretty much why I currently don't use IDEs like Zed: even if I wanted to I can't because it presents no accessibility tree.