How to solve keyboard shortcuts not working in Google Chrome on Windows?

2 min read.

This article explains a fix to a puzzling issue I had with Google Chrome, where my keyboard shortcuts would seemingly randomly stop working and I’d need to click around (or change to another application with Alt+Tab) to get them working again.

Luckily, the solution (or I guess it’s more like a workaround, as usual) turned out to be simple.

Problem

Table of Contents

Any time I would close a tab in Google Chrome using Ctrl+W, that would stop any other keyboard shortcut (such as Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+Switch+Tab to switch tabs) from working. For someone, whose day-to-day computer usage includes a lot of keyboard shortcuts to change back and forth between windows, apps and desktops, this is quite bothersome.

Even switching to another app and back to the Chrome window does not help.

What gives?

Reason

Knowing Google Chrome has a lot of flags and settings, I started going through any flags in Chrome or any custom keyboard shortcuts, but everything was basically set up with defaults. Additionally, I used keyboard detective to find out if any global shortcut keys were interfering with Chrome… But it brought up absolutely nothing.

And then I did notice this…

That’s a small tooltip jumping out in front of my face. And whenever it was visible, my shortcuts weren’t working.

The tooltip does not belong there, though – I have nothing to “close”, and it’s definitely not my profile name either. It’s just something that comes up at the wrong place after hitting a keyboard shortcut in Chrome.

Disabling all extensions did nothing either. Restarting Chrome would always clear the issue, until it came up (usually right after hitting Ctrl+W or similar key combination!) and while restarting my PC would clear the issue for hours or days, that didn’t feel like a sustainable option.

Solution

Unfortunately, you will need to reset your Chrome profile. You won’t lose your bookmarks, history or saved passwords, and by taking a backup of your profile before resetting, you can even restore all of your tabs etc.

I mean, that’s what I did. And it worked 😁

So here’s the process:

1. Take a backup of your Chrome profile

This is of course optional, but probably a good precaution to take (or if you want your tabs back after the reset):

Close Chrome.
Open File Explorer and navigate to: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data (on a Mac this will obviously be different, but I assume Macs don’t have any bugs so this probably doesn’t concern Mac users anyway)
Copy the folder for the old profile (could be “default” or “Profile 1”)
Paste the folder somewhere safe (this will take a while)
You can now open Chrome again

And on to resetting we go.

2. Reset your Google Chrome profile

Navigate to:

chrome://settings/resetProfileSettings?origin=userclick&search=reset

And select “Restore settings to their original defaults” -> “Reset settings”

Sure – it does look pretty intimidating. But you’ll get temporary site data back from your backup (should you want it!) and extensions are fungible.

3. You should be good!

Enjoy your bug-free Google Chrome usage experience!

Well, unless you run into any other bugs, that is. But you should have cleared this one!

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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