This post was published 2 years 5 months 25 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.

Here’s something that I am constantly dealing with. Maybe a few readers can attest to having pulled their hair out concerning the same issue. In certain scenarios, the ‘delete’ key in Firefox will return you back to the previous page causing you to lose any content that you may have inputted into a Textarea. I’ve suffered from this little hurdle when writing articles with WordPress online – type a considerable chunk of text, accidently press the ‘delete’ key when the textarea does not have focus, lose any content that was not saved. Irritating!

Fortunately, MacOSXHints has a convenient little about:config trick that will disable the ‘delete goes back’ "feature" in Firefox.

1. Open a new Firefox window
2. Enter about:config into the location bar. Press Enter. The about:config page will open. It’s a huge list of Firefox configuration properties.
3. Enter browser.backspace into the filter. This will bring the ‘Browser.backspace_action’ preference into view.
4. Contrl-click the ‘Browser.backspace_action’ Value column, and choose Modify from the pop-up menu, then enter a new value of 2.
5. Press OK.

You can find the original article on MacOSXHints.com. This is definitely a no-brainer Firefox tweak for anyone who happens to edit large articles in their browser.