At the time that Firefox killed off Esc, I was part of the old school crowd that complained.
After the smoke cleared, I came to the conclusion that Firefox had crossed a threshold and transformed from being a networked document display application to being an operating environment that was a platform for applications. Javascript, the DOM and CSS had advanced to the point where keyboard controls biased towards convenient document browsing no longer made sense.
I'd be all for Firefox removing the Backspace default keybinding even though it would slightly inconvenience me since that's the key I use to go back.
After the smoke cleared, I came to the conclusion that Firefox had crossed a threshold and transformed from being a networked document display application to being an operating environment that was a platform for applications. Javascript, the DOM and CSS had advanced to the point where keyboard controls biased towards convenient document browsing no longer made sense.
I'd be all for Firefox removing the Backspace default keybinding even though it would slightly inconvenience me since that's the key I use to go back.