Firefox backspace button action should be "Previous Page" not "Page Up"

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Mon Oct 29 10:52:53 UTC 2007


Mark wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> i was just wondering why Firefox had page up action bound to the
> backspace button. and i end up reading this bug report:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358764
> 
> Now the default action for Firefox in fedora is "page up" and i think
> nearly every keyboard in the world _has_ a page up key so please
> remove that silly default action. A patch for this to give the
> backspace the "previous page" (or whatever you want to call it) action
> is very simple:
> 
> type (in the address bar): about:config
> find: browser.backspace_action
> The value is likely to be on: 1. Change that value to 0 and backspace
> is acting the way it should do.
> 
> I don't know where firefox is getting the "logic" to make firefox
> default backspace action "previous page" in windows and "page up" in
> linux.. just doesn't make sense to me.
> 
> And could this be patched in the firefox that is in the fedora repo?
> or (if fedora chooses not to patch it to the "previous page" action)
> than make it no action at all!! "page up" is just not good.
> 
> Bigzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=355511
> 
> Posted here because i would like to know the users and developer
> opinions about this.
> 

Authoritatively, the action for backspace should be to do nothing on 
Linux.  This was discussed with the GNOME usability guy, Sun, Novell, 
and Mozilla a bit ago and was checked in as per the bug you posted.  It 
appears that it is still not in the 2.x branch though other distros such 
have patched it in, with a quick glance.

I guess having had this set in my local preferences for ages, I sort of 
forgot about it in the 2.x branch.  I am okay with turning this pref to 
do nothing even though it will be last minute as this is what upstream 
has decided and will be in future versions of Firefox as it best matches 
the platform convention.




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