Chrome turned off navigation back on the backspace button

“For many years we received so many complaints that we decided to finally make the right choice.”

Those Chrome / Chromium users who are used to pressing Backspace to return to the previous page will have to change their habits. This became clear from the discussion in the Chromium bug tracker ( Issue 608016 ).

The discussion began with an innocent bug-report: after updating to the latest version of Chrome 52.0.2720.0 (Canary), the user’s Backspace button for navigation has stopped working. As it turned out, this is not a bug at all. Now Chrome by default does not return to the previous page on Backspace . The developers warned about the change back in April: see Issue 1854963002 , the commit of April 11 .

According to the statistics collected (UseCounters), the developers write, the Backspace button is used on only 0.04% of web pages when navigating, that is, in 99.96% of cases, users prefer to press Alt + Left or move the mouse pointer and click on the graphic button left arrow.

Obviously, the hot key option is much more convenient. But, as often happens, very few people know about “hot” keys and very few people use them.
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In the case of Backspace , the developers write, there is a problem: users use this key to delete the previous character, and not to navigate to the previous page. This is evidenced by another indicator of statistics UseCounters: when filling out web forms with text, the percentage of navigation to the previous page using Backspace drops to insignificant 0.005%. Obviously, people are afraid of losing their input. If the text form is out of focus, pressing Backspace will not delete the previous character, but will load the previous page with the loss of the data entered into the form.

“For many years, we have received so many user complaints that we decided to finally make the right choice and change it, given the suffering that users experience, losing [the data entered in the forms], and because each platform has a different keyboard shortcut for navigating back, ” explained one of the developers in the bug tracker.

For those who still want to leave the navigation on Backspace , they wanted to implement a special flag in the settings, but then they abandoned this idea .

PS In the main version of Chrome 50, the Backspace button still works, but it will stop with the update to Chrome 52.