I’d imagine it’s a pretty common problem when the backspace key is mapped to your browser’s back function.

The web sometimes meets you half way on this concern. I never worry about my word press blog entries, for instance, because it autosaves my compositions every couple minutes. (Thank you!) Opera tends to let me press forward or back buttons to undo my mistake, and all my work is still there in the text field. This is assuming the website coders allow you to cache the page.

There’s a new kid on the block in web development, though, and he’s not going to play nice with the browser’s back and forward buttons. I’m talking, of course, about AJAX. If I click a link and it pops a fancy AJAX text field into the page, I’m liable to lose my work when the back and forward buttons fail to reshow that AJAX insert.

The solution seems fairly simple. Browsers should support a way to lock a page. Once I’ve locked a page, back, forward, refresh, and close messages sent to my browser should be intercepted by a popup, asking me if I really want to let the message go through. This is similar to the popup in text editors “Do you want to save before closing?”. I can choose to let the brwoser continue processing the command, or cancel it and be looking at the same page.

Opera’s already halfway on this feature; I can lock a page and prevent it from being accidentally closed. I’m sure there’s a Firefox plugin that does the same, if it isn’t built in. I’d like to see built in support from both browsers. I know better than to ask IE for anything useful.

I started looking for benchmarks, and found none. My search string was pretty similar to the title of this post. That’s on purpose, because I want to help anyone else looking for a benchmark on this feature.

THIS FEATURE DOES NOTHING EXCEPT RE-INTRODUCE AN OLD WINDOWS BUG.

That’s right! There’s no performance increase available through this checkbox. It simply reintroduces an old bug that some old software relies on, so that said old software can regain the performance it lost when the bug was fixed. If you’re just an everyday average Joe like me trying to tweak your computer for the best performance, this checkbox isn’t going to help you. In fact, it’s going to hurt you, because if the disk loses power you could lose or corrupt your files.

You can read the full story, courtesy of Raymond Chen, at this link.
Windows Confidential: The Power of Bugs

Special thanks to the members of DriverHeaven for helping me find this article and the real answer to what this Vista feature is all about.