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Why the hell does my browser back up when i hit the backspace button-only on photo.net!!


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What do you mean "only on photo.net"? Is it because you only browse on photo.net? It's standard browser behaviour for Internet Explorer on Windows, and for at least some other combinations as well.

 

If you see sites where it doesn't do it, it's probably because they have done something annoying that prevents proper back-functionality.

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Blocking the back-function can be quite necessary. For example when you are on a dynamic site and the page you came from is calculated on data that's no longer available. Blocking the backbutton in such cases prevents errors.
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This is sort of off-topic, but I had to respond to:

"Blocking the back-function can be quite necessary. For example when you are on a dynamic site and the page you came from is calculated on data that's no longer available. Blocking the backbutton in such cases prevents errors."

 

Apart from actual *blocking* not being necessary in this case and obviously bad for the users experience (an informative message on the page you back up to is a lot more useful), I have never seen a single instance of this being done (though I've seen some pages with informative messages instead of the usual "This page has expired" sort of stuff). But I have seen hundreds and hundreds of sites that either deliberately or more likely out of stupidity, effectively blocked the back-function with zero-second refreshes and similar junk, preventing people from going back where they came from, and me from ever wanting to visit the site again.

 

Preventing backing up, which is a basic navigational facility on the web, is just as bad as popping up a neverending series of new windows of ads when you enter or leave a page.

 

If the pages are in a new window opened specifically for them for instance for a banking application or similar, it can be useful to obstruct backing, but that's a different situation (and this I have seen a couple of times). In a normal browsing window, backing should *always* be possible.

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MSIE for Macintosh also has the stupid "delete means go to the

previous page" behaviour. At least when you aren't typing in a text

box. Netscape doesn't. Perhaps it's a Microsoftism.

 

It's an awful design feature because, as you point out, it greatly

increases the risk of losing data by mistake.

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When that happens, why not just hit the 'forward' button in your browser. At least on mine it takes me right back to the place I was typing, text intact. I just did it to test. (I'm using IE 5.5 on Windows ME, but I believe the behavior would be the same on all IE versions since 3.0, and most Netscape versions as well.) OTOH, backspace should have the expected behavior when used inside a text box, ie deleting text to the left of the cursor. As others have stated, this is not limited to Photo.net, it's a specification of web browser standards.
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