Are you using Backspace to go "Back" or to delete text?

During the past two hours, reports have flooded in of keys not working properly on YouTube, for example, spacebar is ignored or plays/pauses the video even in an editing field. We think Google did an update but we don't have a fix yet. Hopefully in a few hours we'll have clarity on the problem and workarounds.

I'm sorry, I meant "Spacebar", not backspace. I tried to use it to separate words from each other

There have been quite a few reports about this YouTube issue recently.

Looks like a YouTube bug where JavaScript always interprets a space bar and other characters as control keys and doesn't disable this action when an input field has focus.

See also:

• /questions/1328819 Youtube search bar issues

A possible workaround for now is to write text or affected characters elsewhere (e.g. in the location bar) and paste the clipboard content in the search bar or comment field.

Hi

Thank you for flagging up this issue.

YouTube have looked into this and will be correcting the issue shortly.

I have the same issue with the backspace/Delete key not working as in it will not go to the previous page. Thought it was just YouTube however the same exact problem is on every webpage.

Seems to be connected to the latest Firefox update. For almost 2 weeks I kept getting popup windows to download the latest upgrade. I'd click on it and itd go away until the next day and repeat the process. So after 2 weeks of this the upgrade finally upgraded yesterday.

The problem with the backspace/Delete key started immediately after the upgrade. Got a MacBook Air. Is there some way I can delete the latest upgrade so I can hopefully get back to speed??????

Hi wfluit, the default behavior of the Backspace key was changed. Here is where you can control that:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter/Return. Click the button accepting the risk.

(2) In the search box in the page, type or paste backs and pause while the list is filtered -- should look like the attached screenshot

(3) Double-click the browser.backspace_action preference to display an editing field, and change the value to 0 then press Enter or click the blue check mark button to save the change.

For reference, this setting tells Firefox, if you press Backspace outside of a text editing field, to:

• 0 = Go "Back" in history
• 1 = Page Up
• 2 = ignore the keypress (default)