Probably not the last note about Ubuntu ;) It seems that the default action for backspace on the Ubuntu platform is page up. While that doesn't bother me in most cases, in browsing it does.
For firefox at least, you can fix this. Just browse to
about:config, search for backspace and change the (probably)
2 to a
0. In case you're interested, it seems that
0 means backspace goes back,
1 is page up and
2 does nothing. Meh?
Check
this bug report for more info.
Unfortunately there's no fix for Chrome. They
intentionally removed the functionality (and only in Linux, or maybe even Ubuntu) "to protect users from losing form data". Uh, hello. If you're really keen on this, why don't you do a sweep across form elements on the page and see if their data has changed from page load and prompt the user if anything was changed. Meh. At least alt+left still works.