A tricky situation in malone bug 60995

[Jan Claeys]

Op zondag 21-10-2007 om 12:53 uur [tijdzone +1300], schreef Matthew Paul
Thomas:
> On Oct 21, 2007, at 9:03 PM, Martin Olsson wrote:
> >
> > Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> >>
> >> It's the wrong way to fix it. You can lose data by clicking enter
> >> while a link is focused too, should we disable the enter key? The
> >> right solution has been mentioned multiple times in multiple places:
> >> prompt "Are you sure you want to change page and lose what you typed?"
> 
> A confirmation alert is usually the worst possible solution to any 
> design problem. People treat it as an interruption rather than as a 
> serious question. (Some horrid Web sites already do this, with 
> JavaScript alerts of the form "Are you sure you want to navigate away 
> from this page?")
> 
> There are two general solutions to the problem of something dangerous 
> being too easy to do: make it less dangerous, or make it harder to do.
[example of caching form data not always working snipped]
> Which leaves us with the other option: making accidentally going back 
> harder to do. Alt+Left instead of Backspace achieves this, but it seems 
> to be *too much* harder for some people.
> 
> One alternative would be to make "[" the shortcut key for Back. It 
> would still be possible to press it by accident when no text field was 
> focused, but much *less likely* than pressing Backspace by accident in 
> the same situation. And it would have another benefit that Backspace 
> does not have: an obvious counterpart key for Forward, "]".

The "disabled backspace fix" removes only one arbitrarily chosen (and
most likely not the most-frequent) of hundreds of ways to suffer
accidental data loss while filling in a form in Firefox.  And at the
same time it causes UI-problems for users that are forced to adapt to an
arbitrarily chosen alternative that they don't know ("[" is hardly more
discoverable or easy-to-use than Alt+Left).  *That* is why people are
upset.

One solution that I could live with is to pop up a dialog or show a
"slide-in" message (as the Firefox developers seem to like these days)
that gives you a choice to enable or disable Backspace when you try to
use it for the first time, also mentioning the keys available as an
alternative.  The option should preferably be available somewhere in the
preferences GUI too (it could group the behaviour of more than one such
presumed "dangerous" key if needed).


BTW: when the stylesheets don't mess with it, Firefox 3 uses native
GNOME widgets (or at least they look/behave like that) which means you
get a visual cue where the input focus is.


-- 
Jan Claeys