> The same could be said of the developers who think they're always right.
Browsers often include telemetry which can answer questions like "how many of backspace presses to go to the previous page were accidents" which may prove them right. While I don't know if that or a similar method was used or not, why do you think they just "think they're always right"? What if they did a proper research on the usability of this change and found you're in extreme minority?
There was a G+ discussion where Chrome devs discussed this. The suggestion of rigging up monitoring to look for this was considered, but the case was seen as so obvious (user-state loss vs. a week or two to adapt to a changed shortcut) that it wasn't considered worth the effort.
IMO the data above is enough when coupled with anecdotal data. Given that it didn't seem worth investing the considerable engineering effort we would need to gather more data. Although there was disagreement on that point. As Peter said, this decision was only loosely based on metrics. Ultimately it was intuition based on a combination of the data mentioned above and anecdote.
Browsers often include telemetry which can answer questions like "how many of backspace presses to go to the previous page were accidents" which may prove them right. While I don't know if that or a similar method was used or not, why do you think they just "think they're always right"? What if they did a proper research on the usability of this change and found you're in extreme minority?