Backspace in Firefox

Fremantle
2025 June 3 (Tuesday), 10:05AM
· Firefox · keyboards ·

Yesterday I installed Vivaldi in preparation for getting even more annoyed at Firefox (thanks to some piece of unsourced accusatory AI guff about how they were going to get rid of buttons or something… don't worry, I realised it was silly fairly quickly).

But today I find myself going round the twist about some change to how backspace is handled. Has it changed? I thought perhaps I'd knocked some mysterious key combination on my stupid gaming keyboard that had enabled the alt-lock-but-only-sometimes feature, but actually it's just Firefox's browser.backspace_action feature — which hasn't changed for years and my local setting of it also hadn't changed, so I've no idea what's going on.

But anyway, I've turned it off (or on, I guess, as the value is now 1), and can happily type again when my cursor isn't actually focused anywhere. Which, judging by the number of times I was navigating back away from pages, must be quite often. I never knew (and I'm glad it's not Firefox's fault).