Firefox: Backspace = Page up?

While using Firefox 2 on my Ubuntu laptop, I noticed something strange. It would scroll up the web page (if possible) every time I pressed the Backspace key. This is completely different than what it does on my XP system (back one page in history).

I went into about:config and typed backspace in the Filter: field. The value of the entry was one (1). I checked the value of the entry on my Windows machine and it was set to zero (0). Since it was working right on the Windows system, I changed the value to zero on the Ubuntu system. Now, Firefox goes back one page when the backspace key is pressed.

I didn’t know why the default on Ubuntu was different until I went to the MozillaZine page concerning browser.backspace_action. It turns out that Mozilla made the defaults different for Windows and Linux. The reason can be found here.

A Bugzilla entry was created to request the behavior be changed back but, according to one of the comments, it looks like it was abandoned. Oh well. Guess I’ll just have to take the whole 8 seconds required to go into about:config and change it manually.