_I_ use backspace for navigation. What's the alternative? Use a mouse?

Alt-Left.

On Mac OS X, the standard shortcut is Command-[ instead (and Command-] is Forward).

I generally use three fingers swipe to the left.

As do I. Actually, if I have a mouse, I tend to right click, then hit back, it's the first option.

In general Command-Left/Right-arrow should work as well unless it's been taken out of Safari.

if you use vimium/vimperator/something else you can do shift+H to go backwards, shift+L to go forward.

Which would require me to press two keys instead of one.

Considering we're talking about Vim here, pressing keys should be second nature to you anyway...

yeah but not to move your hand if you're on the homerow

There are still browsers that don't maintain form state across back/forward history?

(I'm a little surprised by this because I thought all browsers used backspace for back)

Chrome and Firefox. Probably IE too.

Not on Linux, where the 'previous page' action is mapped to Alt-left by default. After being initially frustrated, I got really used to Alt-Left for going back.

The reasoning behind it is pretty smart too, because numerous times backspace can result in the loss of data, like when you're filling up a form and you hit backspace outside of a text box.

Indeed, I like the 'alt-left' keyboard shortcut, though I especially like it because it does the same thing in both Chrome and Firefox on both Windows and Linux! Yay for consistency!

No, at least for me (Firefox on Linux) Backspace doesn't do anything special.

The “backspace = back” behavior of Firefox is only enabled by default on Windows. The behavior is controlled by the about:config setting `browser.backspace_action` (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.backspace_action).

It also appears to be enabled by default on Mac OS X.

Ah, thanks. I don't need it anyway :) Alt + Left/Right works fine.