Backspace: Chrome's Biggest Flaw

1 point

13 years ago

In Chrome for Mac and Windows, you can hit backspace as a shortcut for the back button in the browser. In some ways, this is kind of smart—great for accessibility—it’s fast and one-handed, but the web has changed. With web apps, typing effectively and confidently is more important than ever.

These applications try to be smart about where your cursor should be, but they aren’t perfect and often don’t account for every possibility. Or your banking/shopping website is coded by a moron and somehow you end up hitting delete and losing your transaction details when it jumps you between fields.

If you haven’t experienced this, you’re a more accurate typist than me, even more of a lurker, or using Chrome for linux (where it’s been fixed), but when I’m writing, backspace should mean backspace and should never delete ALL of what I’m working on.

Google has a number of open issues for this merged into: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36533