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The backspace thing has gotten attention more than ever on sites like Reddit. I have routinely seen posts complaining about it and the spacebar key doing behavi

The backspace thing has gotten attention more than ever on sites like Reddit. I have routinely seen posts complaining about it and the spacebar key doing behaviors that users never ever intended. For example, pressing space and then accidentally scrolling down which wasn't their intention at all, but is the behavior of space. I think some of those complaints reaching the front page of reddit may have helped spur this into action by the Chrome team.

retox 10y ago
The tyranny of the vocal minority. It's a race to the bottom.
- euyyn 10y ago
  So an opinion with enough upvotes to get to the front page of a site where power users lurk is "the tyranny of the vocal minority"?
  - Jare 10y ago
    Yep, their power-user-ness or the fact that they frequent a particular enthusiast forum does not make them any less of a minority when the software we're talking about is used by many millions of people (the silent majority).
- r00fus 10y ago
  Do you think it actually makes sense to keep the backspace as "page-back"? It's literally lost me dozens of form entries over the years (some of which were very hard to restore). Thankfully on OSX/Safari, this legacy behavior/cruft is not present.
  - retox 10y ago
    Seems like change for change sake, like so many of Google changes. Unilaterally changing 20 year behaviour that effects less than half one percent of users isn't an improvement it's rearranging chairs on the titanic. Also, Lazarus is an old plugin for Firefox that saves forms between sessions/refreshes. Too bad goog want to capture new users at any expense. If it doesn't work because the latest hotness is js forms that's a problem with webdevs.
- chc 10y ago
  Do you really feel like the majority of PC users want backspace to navigate in a web browser? I seriously doubt the majority have ever intentionally used that shortcut. It wouldn't even surprise me if it were more often used unintentionally than intentionally.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Most users don't want shit. They take what is given to them and learn to use it. Which means every feature you remove from your software is one less thing your users can do now. Good if you're lazy, but the point of software should be to empower people to do more.
animeweedlord 10y ago
I'm gonna be majorly pissed if they disable space bar scroll. I use that quite literally constantly while I'm browsing. It is the scrolling method I use 99% of the time. Backspace to go back, OTOH, I was aware of, but I doubt I ever wanted. Alt-Left is easier to use because it's less modal. Still bothers me in general when devs screw with established defaults.
- shkkmo 10y ago
  I think the backspace thing matters more than spacebar, because spacebar isn't going to cause you to lose (potentially hours of) work. I do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .
  - OJFord 10y ago
    The most confusing thing is that Youtube and Netflix seem to occasionally toggle pause when you press space; other times Youtube scrolls, and Netflix does nothing (there'd be nowhere to scroll). I've never managed to consistently replicate it by having had the player in/out of focus already, not/scrolled, etc. odd.
    - ydant 10y ago
      It's YouTube specific, but "k" is more reliable for me as a pause/unpause button on YouTube.
  - grapeshot 10y ago
    Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.
  - grapeshot 10y ago
    Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.
shkkmo 10y ago
Reddit might have had an impact, but they have been gathering data to support fixing this for years: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=200049& https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=200049...
dredmorbius 10y ago
Spacebar scroll is standard on many Unix utilities, starting with pagers such as less and more. Given that paging down a screen of text is very likely to be one of the most common things you'll do, and that it's a well-established motif, as well as the fact it doesn't destroy user-state (as back-nav on backspace does), it's quite defensible. I've never actually seen someone complain about it until now.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  People complain about it all the time on anything having to do with video playing, because when the video player has focus space is used to play/pause the video, but when the player is not focused, it scrolls down the page. Frankly, I would be perfectly happy if space to page went away entirely. I exclusively use two finger dragging on laptops and scroll wheels on desktops to browse websites. I never use space to move down a whole page at a time, and that's a jarring action anyway because it inevitably causes me to lose the context of where I was reading in the document in a way that smooth scrolling accomplished through other means does not.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Most of my desktop use is on a Thinkpad laptop with no mouse and the trackpad disabled. I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen. The gaming instance is a failure of Web controls to adequately adapt to context. I can see how that would be distracting. I am not willing to sacrifice my space-to-scroll capabilities on that account. As with Fitts' law, the spacebar is a very large target. Easy to hit. Frequent action. Well-placed use. You do raise one other point: scrolling tends to make re-aquiring reading point difficult. That's a fair gripe and one that annoys me. I'm particularly sensitive to it in DuckDuckGo, which smooth-scrolls a pre-set amount in the SERP when scrolling (I forget if by up/down, pgup/pgdwn, space, or other). I absolutely cannot figure out where I was and where I want to be, and have reported this multiple times. For long-form text, I've taken a strong preferene, in portrait display devices (my tablet when reading) to fully paginated text, and a page flip mode. Much as PDF is an abysmal format in many ways, I find the capability to retain a spatial memory of where content is on a book or in a page is useful, and generally prefer this to smooth-scrolling. Pocket, which offers a page-flip mode, makes it both brittle and of limited utility. Any up-down motion whilst flipping a page "breaks" page-flip mode and returns to scroll. Page-flip doesn't clearly indicate location within the work as a whole (Pocket also mutes the scrollbar indicator generally). And lastly, the pages aren't consistently presented -- effectivly Pocket repaginates a document whenever and wherever you enter into Page Flip mode. I'd prefer it had a sense of what the pagination breaks were for a given viewport size and font selection, and stuck to that. Or I could read a book....
shardo 10y ago
wow, I didn't even know you could scroll using spacebar. Neat!

retox 10y ago

The tyranny of the vocal minority. It's a race to the bottom.

euyyn 10y ago
So an opinion with enough upvotes to get to the front page of a site where power users lurk is "the tyranny of the vocal minority"?
- Jare 10y ago
  Yep, their power-user-ness or the fact that they frequent a particular enthusiast forum does not make them any less of a minority when the software we're talking about is used by many millions of people (the silent majority).
r00fus 10y ago
Do you think it actually makes sense to keep the backspace as "page-back"? It's literally lost me dozens of form entries over the years (some of which were very hard to restore). Thankfully on OSX/Safari, this legacy behavior/cruft is not present.
- retox 10y ago
  Seems like change for change sake, like so many of Google changes. Unilaterally changing 20 year behaviour that effects less than half one percent of users isn't an improvement it's rearranging chairs on the titanic. Also, Lazarus is an old plugin for Firefox that saves forms between sessions/refreshes. Too bad goog want to capture new users at any expense. If it doesn't work because the latest hotness is js forms that's a problem with webdevs.
chc 10y ago
Do you really feel like the majority of PC users want backspace to navigate in a web browser? I seriously doubt the majority have ever intentionally used that shortcut. It wouldn't even surprise me if it were more often used unintentionally than intentionally.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Most users don't want shit. They take what is given to them and learn to use it. Which means every feature you remove from your software is one less thing your users can do now. Good if you're lazy, but the point of software should be to empower people to do more.

animeweedlord 10y ago

I'm gonna be majorly pissed if they disable space bar scroll. I use that quite literally constantly while I'm browsing. It is the scrolling method I use 99% of the time. Backspace to go back, OTOH, I was aware of, but I doubt I ever wanted. Alt-Left is easier to use because it's less modal. Still bothers me in general when devs screw with established defaults.

shkkmo 10y ago
I think the backspace thing matters more than spacebar, because spacebar isn't going to cause you to lose (potentially hours of) work. I do find the spacebar behavior isn't super predictable when I am trying to pause things, such as youtube .
- OJFord 10y ago
  The most confusing thing is that Youtube and Netflix seem to occasionally toggle pause when you press space; other times Youtube scrolls, and Netflix does nothing (there'd be nowhere to scroll). I've never managed to consistently replicate it by having had the player in/out of focus already, not/scrolled, etc. odd.
  - ydant 10y ago
    It's YouTube specific, but "k" is more reliable for me as a pause/unpause button on YouTube.
- grapeshot 10y ago
  Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.
- grapeshot 10y ago
  Chrome is lately behaving even more unpredictably when scrolling with the spacebar, because now if you click on either the back or forward buttons it puts a focus rectangle on them and now pressing space will go back/forward again instead of scrolling down like I wanted.

shkkmo 10y ago

Reddit might have had an impact, but they have been gathering data to support fixing this for years: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=200049& https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=200049...

dredmorbius 10y ago

Spacebar scroll is standard on many Unix utilities, starting with pagers such as less and more. Given that paging down a screen of text is very likely to be one of the most common things you'll do, and that it's a well-established motif, as well as the fact it doesn't destroy user-state (as back-nav on backspace does), it's quite defensible. I've never actually seen someone complain about it until now.

CydeWeys 10y ago
People complain about it all the time on anything having to do with video playing, because when the video player has focus space is used to play/pause the video, but when the player is not focused, it scrolls down the page. Frankly, I would be perfectly happy if space to page went away entirely. I exclusively use two finger dragging on laptops and scroll wheels on desktops to browse websites. I never use space to move down a whole page at a time, and that's a jarring action anyway because it inevitably causes me to lose the context of where I was reading in the document in a way that smooth scrolling accomplished through other means does not.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Most of my desktop use is on a Thinkpad laptop with no mouse and the trackpad disabled. I don't have a scroll wheel or a touch screen. The gaming instance is a failure of Web controls to adequately adapt to context. I can see how that would be distracting. I am not willing to sacrifice my space-to-scroll capabilities on that account. As with Fitts' law, the spacebar is a very large target. Easy to hit. Frequent action. Well-placed use. You do raise one other point: scrolling tends to make re-aquiring reading point difficult. That's a fair gripe and one that annoys me. I'm particularly sensitive to it in DuckDuckGo, which smooth-scrolls a pre-set amount in the SERP when scrolling (I forget if by up/down, pgup/pgdwn, space, or other). I absolutely cannot figure out where I was and where I want to be, and have reported this multiple times. For long-form text, I've taken a strong preferene, in portrait display devices (my tablet when reading) to fully paginated text, and a page flip mode. Much as PDF is an abysmal format in many ways, I find the capability to retain a spatial memory of where content is on a book or in a page is useful, and generally prefer this to smooth-scrolling. Pocket, which offers a page-flip mode, makes it both brittle and of limited utility. Any up-down motion whilst flipping a page "breaks" page-flip mode and returns to scroll. Page-flip doesn't clearly indicate location within the work as a whole (Pocket also mutes the scrollbar indicator generally). And lastly, the pages aren't consistently presented -- effectivly Pocket repaginates a document whenever and wherever you enter into Page Flip mode. I'd prefer it had a sense of what the pagination breaks were for a given viewport size and font selection, and stuck to that. Or I could read a book....

shardo 10y ago

wow, I didn't even know you could scroll using spacebar. Neat!