To reload a page in a web browser, I often click the address bar and then press the enter key, for two reasons: first, I prefer this over clicking the ‘reload’ button because it guarantees that I won't re-submit form data. It is the best way to cleanly reload a page. Second, the cursor is usually very near to this bar anyway, and my hands are much nearer to the enter key than F5, and I'm of course way too lazy to press ctrl-R or command-R.
Since several years however, Google Chrome has started to sabotage this behaviour in a very annoying way. I noticed that my first enter keypress was often totally ignored. A while later I noticed the second press was also becoming ignored. This only got worse, now usually I have to press the key 4 times before the page is reloaded. The more it annoyed me, the worse it got.
Finally someone else also brought up this issue on SuperUser.com. It was still a mystery why the first presses were ignored and why there is variation in the number of presses before Chrome finally responds. The only reasonable explanation is that there must be a deliberate delay programmed in Chrome that ignores enter keypresses within a certain time period after clicking the address bar, unless something has been typed. Experiments have confirmed this, and the delay seems to be exactly 3 seconds in the current version of Chrome. This explains why the more one becomes aware of this issue, the worse it becomes: pressing Enter at a faster rate only results in more ignored keypresses. The only solution is to do absolutely nothing within 3 seconds after clicking the address bar. Of course it then becomes quicker to use one of the other reload methods, but only in a backwards kind of way because the most efficient method has been sabotaged. And if you need to use this method to reload a page without re-sending any POST data, then waiting the full 3 seconds is the only option.
My question is: why on earth was this implemented? What is the motivation? I cannot think of any good reason. Some developer must have spent time on implementing this and I have no clue why. The 3-second ignore period does not exist when bashing random keys immediately after clicking the bar—why would it need to exist when nothing has been typed? The only effect this has is to annoy people. Maybe it is yet another side effect of some change that caters for smartphones and tablets, because obviously laptops and desktop computers are totally identical to those devices [/sarcasm].
Please Google remove this “feature.”
