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0 pointstux35y ago0 comments

Whoa, that is incredible, thank you SO MUCH! <3

I don't think I can explain the extent to which this simple papercut has been vicious and painful to me.

So many times, I've started writing some long post in a text field and accidentally lost it due to pressing some wrong keyboard shortcut (oops, you pressed backspace outside a text field! oops, we bound this key to 'reload the page', oops you closed the form by pressing ESC!). It's always a particular type of sinking feeling to have to start writing all over again.

Now there are extensions for this, and some of them even work. But what's my natural instinct when I have data in a text field I really don't want to lose because I would feel terrible losing it?

Well, ^A ^C and go paste it in a notepad, maybe even finish editing it there.

... and then Firefox quits, maybe because my layout switched between AZERTY and QWERTY by accident, maybe because my finger slipped between A and Q. And I get to stare at my desktop, crushed and defeated, having lost my data at the exact worst possible time...

I was seriously starting to consider maintaining my own Firefox fork, and I _cannot thank you enough_!

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4 comments · 3 top-level

iFreilicht5y ago· 1 in thread

Oh god yes, backspace outside the text box is the worst. Some websites mitigate this themselves, but it would really be nice if the browser could take care of this.

roryokane5y ago

Firefox already lets you disable that using the browser.backspace_action setting in about:config: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/924490

dhekir5y ago

Fixing the Ctrl+Q issue is great, but I still think extensions such as Form History Control are essential for all other situations. I'd very much appreciate if Mozilla could vet it for security; I'm always afraid of some developer selling out or being hacked and a future update introducing a backdoor.

Izkata5y ago

> So many times, I've started writing some long post in a text field and accidentally lost it due to pressing some wrong keyboard shortcut (oops, you pressed backspace outside a text field! oops, we bound this key to 'reload the page', oops you closed the form by pressing ESC!).

For me it's often ctrl+w to delete one word, which terminals have gotten me used to. I don't want the shortcut removed because I use it all the time to close tabs outside a text box, but it also still working while focused in one is annoying.

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