I recently switched the default browser on all my machines from Firefox to Google Chrome. In general I’m loving Chrome but there is one behaviour that is driving me nuts. Scrolling with the mouse wheel takes keyboard focus away from the document.

Here’s what happens. I’ve just opened a page or switched to a new tab and the page has keyboard focus as I can use the keyboard up/down and PgUp/PgDn keys to scroll it; no problem there. But if I then use the wheel on my mouse to scroll the page, it loses the keyboard focus and no longer responds to up/down, PgUp/PgDn, or in fact any other keyboard keys. I have to click on the page background to restore the keyboard focus. This is a minor inconvenience for scrolling but where it really drives me nuts is in Google Reader and Gmail where I use keyboard shortcuts a lot. Here I find that I scroll the article or e-mail I’m reading with the mouse wheel then get no response when I press j/k to move to the next or previous article or e-mail.

I am using Windows 7 and the Chrome dev channel (version 4.0.249.43).