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.
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.
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.
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.
Right hand on mouse, left hand on WASD. The spacebar is always easy to hit your thumb, but you have to move your right hand away the mouse to hit Page Down. Plus it mixes well with Vimperator-like extensions, to the point that I can do 90% of my browsing with one hand.
EDIT: and before anyone points out that if I'm already using extensions I could easily add another, yes and I would if I had to, but it's not ideal, because 1. Extensions crash, fail to load, or aren't allowed by internal browser pages, and 2. You sometimes have to use other peoples' machines and it's annoying when basic functionality is locked away.
All keyboards have a spacebar. Not all keyboards today have dedicated page up/page down keys. So potentially more keystrokes due to the function layer.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I use the middle button + trackpoint for scrolling - works great. That's the default on most Linux distros/desktop environments, might require some configuration on Windows.
I don't think that's particularly applicable here. I doubt that any touch typist has problems finding the vast majority of the keys on their keyboard (or mouse). Also, how often do you hit space while reading an article anyway, a couple of times per minutes? It's nowhere near being time-sensitive. Even if it somehow took you ten seconds to find it each time before you hit it, your finger would have found it and be settled on it by the time you reached the bottom of the page and were ready to go onto the next.
But the middle track point button is just the right distance. When I relax my hand muscles and place it on the keyboard so that the tip of the index finger is on the track point, the thumb is on the track point buttons. Perfect distance. Using the space bar would be uncomfortable.
I use space-to-scroll very frequently when reading long passages of text. I consider it a valuable shortcut.
I don't find it jarring at all to read that way, because I know where to resume reading after hitting space. There is one exception: a lot of websites with absolutely-positioned headers scroll incorrectly when you hit space, such that the point you would resume reading at ends up behind the header, and you have to scroll up a bit to reveal it.
A few websites with headers get it right, and your resume point is below the header after hitting space. This makes me much less sympathetic to the websites that screw it up.
That header issue is especially jarring to me too, and it's one of the reasons I don't use space to page, because it doesn't work consistently everywhere. Two-finger dragging always works, as does scroll wheel.
I do use paginated reading on my Kindle, which always gets it right. It doesn't quite work properly on the web often enough though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I think some of those complaints reaching the front page of reddit may have helped spur this into action by the Chrome team.