This is probably the first time I’ve ever been annoyed with a Google Chrome update. On my desktop and laptop I suddenly found that pressing backspace in the browser would no longer go back one page. Instead there would be shown a popup, telling me to press Alt + Backspace.
“That’s odd.” I thought. Then I realized I was lying in my bed, with my laptop in my, well, lap.
“That’s highly inconvenient.” I then thought. A few minutes later my workflow was interrupted again, “why didn’t my tab navigate backwards?”
At this point the question was asked by my subconscious, not me. Only a few seconds later did my conscious self ask the question, and by then I was annoyed. Not enough to do anything, but I noticed it. I must have pressed backspace with the purpose of navigating backwards a few thousand times this previous year alone, by now it is so deeply embedded in my muscle memory, that when it doesn’t work, it has to go through my subconscious first, I never even thought about pressing backspace while navigating. I certainly do now.
On the bugs.chromium.org board, a few of the quotes go like this:
The reason we're making this change is that users regularly lose data because they hit the backspace button thinking that a form field is focused. After years of this issue, we realize we're not going to have a better way to solve that problem.
Appeal to the wider audience, sure. But don’t leave your faithful, early adopters hanging. The few vocal users on the now locked bug reports (all new topics get merged into these locked ones too), seems to be mainly concerned with having the possibility of remapping the key shortcuts, but with the creation of a new topic dedicated to explore the possibility of a chrome extension, at least there’s hope. Even if we do have to give this extension read/write access to everything.
Here are two plugins that might help you:
