Ubuntu
firefox package

  1. Bug #60995
  2. Comment #125

Comment 125 for bug 60995

Revision history for this message
In , Bugzilla-20-iridos (bugzilla-20-iridos) wrote :

My point was just that it's dishonest to mark this bug as "fixed" and I can't have a very high opinion of these people anyways.

Thinking about it again, there is probably some truth in it that different behavior with focus within a text field and without can be pretty annoying and therefore "backspace" might be a poor choice (although it is kind of intuitive, that backspace goes "back").

But it is also true, that hitting backspace after losing focus is one of the things that happen quite rarely (might be different, when you're on a modem connection and pages/forms load much slower) - quite a *lot* more often I have hit ^U to clear the line and got the source listing of the page, or ^W to erase the last word and closed the tab or window (ha - talk about data-loss there... you can re-open tabs, but a window is gone).

It seems Bug 400518 someone made the trivial patch to change it - but I can't see if he's a dev who put it in svn/cvs/whatever they use.

Anyways... my feeling is, that this is mainly a matter of taste - some just want to have a simple single-key shortcut to go back (how about "Del" if Backspace is a poor choice? It "does nothing" right now and is hardly used for correction during typing) so the "best" alternative would be what someone already suggested - on the first use of "Backspace" outside a text field, the user should be asked what behavior he wants (do nothing/back in history/page up). As obviously different users want different behaviors and even have a strong opinion on this, the best way would be to ask them - saving them the effort to google for a fix that leads to the behavior they want.

(as this bug is closed, putting a copy of the suggestion to Bug 400518 would be a good idea?)

Uh - about "pref locking" - that works as much (or more) against as for you. In this context, I would like to mention, that I'm not coming from an IE (or even Windows) world, but got used to having Backspace to go back purely on Mozilla/Firefox/Iceweasel (the Debian-distributed Firefox) - so I'm kind of all for locking the prefs - of course, locking them in the behavior I got used to...

K.