A tricky situation in malone bug 60995

[Aaron C. de Bruyn]

> I installed Ubuntu just yesterday, and backspace not mapping to 'back
> in history' is the main annoying thing I found. It happened once or
> twice (in a year) that I went one page back when I wanted to delete
> text, because I wasn't focused on the right control. But I'd
> definitely choose the slight possibility of dataloss in that
> particular case, over having backspace duplicate the page up key
> (they're close enough on the keyboard!) instead of Alt-Left (which is
> a really uncomfortable keystroke).

I switched from IE to Firefox for three reasons:
1.  Tabs rock
2.  Open source rocks
3.  Not suddenly finding myself 5 pages back in my history rocks.

I would type something in wrong like my password into a webform and hit backspace a few times to correct it.  From time to time, IE would occasionally freak out thinking I wasn't in a text box or something and suddenly I'd find myself 5 pages back in my history.  My guess is someone messing around with .setfocus() or whatever the heck the javascript command is.  About half the time, the data I entered in my form would be lost.

Sometimes it would be my fault though.  I'd be filling in a long form, tabbing between fields, and there'd be a link between one set of fields.  I'd either tab on to the link and start typing and (not looking at the screen) realized I mistyped a key and hit backspace, or I would tab past the link, start typing, realize I screwed up the field before the link, hit SHIFT+TAB to go back and correct it (forgetting about the link), hit backspace to clear the contents of the field--and suddenly I'm back a page in my history.  Once again, I would occasionally lose my form data with this.

Now maybe firefox is better at saving the form data (I don't pay much attention when it does get saved, just when it gets lost).  And maybe firefox won't be stupid like IE and get confused about backspacing text verses going back a page in history, but I personally feel that backspace is a function related to text.  If you want to go back a page in firefox, use something like ALT+Left Arrow.


But the argument can be avoided altogether.  Maybe an option should be added so people can turn on using backspace as a navigation key.

-A