Can I just say, quickly, that I (expletive deleted)ing HATE the way that pressing Backspace will invariably lose all the work you’ve done in a web form, if you’ve accidentally lost focus on the textbox?
This has to be the single most (same expletive deleted again)ed-up feature of browsers. And yet some people actually like it! Guess they haven’t lost a lot of work to it recently. Yes, I’m still fuming.
IE Team: Please fix in IE7.
I would really, really, really, really, really, really, really like the option of disabling Backspace as a navigation key (I’m happy to use Alt-Left Arrow instead, which is a combination that actually takes effort to use, and so has a high probability of the user typing it purposefully). Backspace is an editing key, not a cursor key!
It can be disabled by site developers for a particular site, but it should be up to the user to disable it if they don’t like it.
If you’re out there, and you hate the Backspace key being used for navigation too, please, send a trackback to this post, or comment the IE blog.
This post brought to you by the letter ‘b’, and the number “half an hour’s worth of lost typing”.
Funny, this was posted over 3 years ago, and Microsoft has yet to fix it. How stupid is it to use the backspace key to navigate the damn browser when we have a MOUSE, KEYBOARD, ON-SCREEN BUTTONS, and usually a back and forward on the form itself, depending on the developer. (Rhetorical – we know how stupid it is)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost 2, 5, 10, 20 minutes worth of composition while posting something, or even making a purchase, and the F*****g backspace key, which is an editing key like DEL, INS, etc… takes me back a page.
That would be analogous to a typewriter shredding your page when you want to erase a mis-key.
Somehow I managed to type this without the backspace key doing it to me – maybe the owner has backspace capture code to prevent it, maybe I’m lucky today. Maybe I should play the lottery too.
I’m constantly using notepad as a scratch pad to paste my work just in case that dreaded key turns into a time machine, wasting minutes of my life at a time, chopping away at my existence.
20 years ago, the Internet and www was structured so differently, it didn’t matter, but now with people doing more and more with their browsers, PLEASE FIX IT. Sometimes you’re so stupid, Microsoft.