FWP: Used to be when surfing the net, you could hit the backspace key and it would take you to the previous page. Not any more, Chrome for whatever reason has decided to put a kibosh to that. Now you have to hit ‘alt + left arrow key’ to get it to go a page back.
I’m hoping someone here knows of a Google add on that will restore the former function of my backspace key. I need that dammit! 
Thanks.
User tip.
At the top of the page is a <- (far left)
Click it and see what happens.
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks for the snark. :rolleyes:
There are very few functions in common software that can’t be accomplished in several different ways. The mass howling over this key change has me boggled.
Well, for me, I have a nerve disorder that makes it difficult to work a touch pad. Especially when the pointer has to hit such a small target. Being able to use the backspace key as an alternative was much easier for me.
It used to be that designers and developers WOULD ASK THEIR CUSTOMERS about their preferences prior to making such changes…
But with everyone being so selfish these days, they don’t even bother. The really scary thing is that these people will be taking care of us in rest homes when we grow older! I imagine they will be ignoring our heart monitors bleeping as they sit there texting on their cell phones…
Does backspace do something different now, or nothing at all?
I don’t understand the snark either.
(waiting for someone to say “Yeah, you should ask for your money back!”)
Most of the time we can look at a software change like this and grumble a bit about how things keep changing, while looking on in awe at the flame wars spawned by such a trivial change.
And then they changed something that affects me.
My rant: VirtualBox changed the behavior of the control key + click combo in Windows VMs, when running in my Mac. They used to let Windows do whatever it wanted with it. A month ago they decided that I always want the Mac way (contrl+click= mouse left click). How infuriating that they unilaterally changed this and did not provide a way to have the original way. No, when I am in Windows I don’t want my mouse behaving like it is a Mac mouse.
So I understand your frustration Grrr!.
It may be a small thing, but it is annoying that stuff like this changes all of the time, and they often do not provide a way to restore the “old way” in some settings panel.
One more point for the folks who cast derision on complainers: It is very difficult to teach my mom how to get things done on her computer. Once she finds the golden sequence of steps to buy from Amazon or edit a Word document she is fine. Trivial changes to the UI have a far greater impact in her ability to use her computer. This is something that most folks wouldn’t expect, but it is a very real problem for older people who are not computer savvy.
Also there are people who use computers 8 hours a day for work. A slight change can make their work much more efficient.
For example being able to enter a zip code, then the city/state is automatically filled in. That is something I coded into a database and the people who used it thanked me profusely.
Sadly, these days, developers do not consult with the people who use these systems daily.
You’re talking about the 1800s, right? Before the obsolescent design era?
The back arrow still works on mine, version Version 51.0.2704.103 m. Reinstall an older version, and tell it not to automatically upgrade without your informed consent…
One press seems to do nothing. Two presses on the backspace brings up a popup saying “press alt - <left arrow> to go back”. Which may mean they plan to assign another function to the backspace key, but giving people time to change habits first.
Personally I’ve always used the alt-arrow keys. It has the advantage of working even when an input box has focus.
Jeez, you know what? I never knew the Backspace key would do the same thing as clicking the left-arrow button at the top left of the page. Whenever I’m surfing and need to do that, my hand is on the mouse, not the keyboard.
Anyway, both still work perfectly, one click, on my old Chrome version 51.
The function they plan on assigning to Backspace is the same that every other application in the world uses: delete the previously typed character. I’m glad that Chrome has fixed an egregious UI mistake.
Sadly, you are not Google’s customer – the advertisers who pay Google for ads are the customers.
It’s easy enough to remap keys to do any function you want. That may be a useful trick for much of the software you use.
It also used to be that if a company gave away something for free, the people who got the free thing wouldn’t imagine that liking the free thing made them the company’s customers. 
Anyway, they do ask their customers (and even just their users) about UI changes, far more today than at any time in the past. Usability studies are a huge deal.
What they don’t do is decide that any feature that any small fraction of the user base is using for anything is worth keeping around forever.
Douglas Crockford writes about “negative value features”, which are features whose functionality is invoked accidentally and incorrectly far more often than they are invoked on purpose. I suspect that for every, “I was using backspace for navigation and now I can’t” situation, there were a dozen “I thought I was correcting text in the text box but instead I went to the previous page” situations.
Not sadly – happily. I’ve got a large corporation making me a great set of tools, and extracting payment for their services from someone else. I have no illusion that they are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but I’m still getting some great shit out of the deal.
This is nonsense.
People in software design are perhaps at fault for listening too much to customer feedback. Someone out there probably once complained “Chrome uses the backspace key for back, but when I hit backspace thinking the browser window was at the front, I deleted my irreplaceable family photos from my windows desktop instead. Why don’t you people ask customers before you implement features like this?!?!”
Software designers DO listen to customer feedback. The problem is that 50% of the feedback is incoherent and the other 50% is contradictory.
That said, the departure from backspace kind of messes up how I like to use the customizable buttons on my mouse, so I’m not thrilled about this particular change either.
Back arrow is working for me as well here on the SDMB. It may be that particular webpages have disabled that option.
But I use the mouse button under my thumb to go back to the previous page.