Bugzilla

Would it be it be feasible to popup the first time an (existing?) user does it, either offering to set browser.backspace_action, or telling them it's an option? For me, it's a feature that I use several times a day that just... stopped working, and I came here to report it as a bug, like bug 1685049. Because this bug is "RESOLVED" (as is that one), it does not show up under a casual search.

Perhaps many of the 40M users do *not* intend to go back when they press backspace; however, even if it's a small percentage of users that do intend to use it (and this is not clear), it's a feature that will appear "broken" for literally millions of people as well, once this lands for them.

Regarding the divergence in back/forward noted in comment 27: often I'm going back from visiting a link in the preceding page; so if there is a balancing action, it's that I'm visiting another link on the preceding page, or using it in other ways. The lack of going forwards does not indicate that going back was unintentional. I did even not know shift-backspace would go forward, as this is non-intuitive. Nor did I know alt-left/right.

I'd echo comment 23's suggestion that if part of the problem is the loss of form data, gating navigation if data has been changed or preserving it so that you can come back to it by going forward (which I think is done much of the time, like here, but could certainly be improved?) is a better response, and would help when people inadvertently go backwards or forward via another method; or perhaps close the tab, restart browser, etc. Perhaps it may be tricky to determine when a change in form data has occurred through user interaction, but such is life.

(FWIW, I also tried to pre-set browser.backspace_action on my Surface Pro with Developer, but I can't because it's already set to 0 - the default.)

Would it be it be feasible to popup the first time an (existing?) user does it, either offering to set browser.backspace_action, or telling them it's an option? For me, it's a feature that I use several times a day that just... stopped working, and I came here to report it as a bug, like bug 1685049. Because this bug is "RESOLVED" (as is that one), it does not show up under a casual search.

Perhaps many of the 40M users do *not* intend to go back when they press backspace; however, even if (and this is not clear) it's a small percentage that do intend to use it, it's a feature that will appear "broken" for literally millions of people as well, once this lands for them.

Regarding the divergence in back/forward noted in comment 27: often I'm going back from visiting a link in the preceding page; so if there is a balancing action, it's that I'm visiting another link on the preceding page, or using it in other ways. The lack of going forwards does not indicate that going back was unintentional. I didn't even know shift-backspace would go forward, as this is non-intuitive; nor did I know alt-left/right.

I'd echo comment 23's suggestion that if part of the problem is the loss of form data, gating navigation if data has been changed or preserving it so that you can come back to it by going forward (which I think is done much of the time, like here, but could certainly be improved?) is a better response, and would help when people inadvertently go backwards or forward via another method; or perhaps close the tab, restart browser, etc. Perhaps it may be tricky to determine when a change in form data has occurred through user interaction, but such is life.

(FWIW, I also tried to pre-set browser.backspace_action on my Surface Pro with Developer, but I can't because it's already set to 0 - the default.)