Tabbing out of the “to:” field in Gmail

Question

I noticed recently that I can't seem to hit Tab to move on to the Subject field in Gmail. Pressing Tab simply inserts a tab, which is rather useless in the To field.

Is that new or have I just not noticed it up until now? Is there a way to fix that?

It's possible that this is affected by a lab setting, but I don't think I have any related labs enabled. Still, just in case labs are relevant, here's the list of the ones I have enabled:

• Mark as Read Button
• Quote Selected Text
• Send & Archive
• Sender Time Zone
• Title Tweaks
• Undo Send
• Unread Message Icon

If all else fails, is there a shortcut to focus on the Subject field?

Answer 1

As it works for me with the same list of labs and Chromium 13.0.782.215 and you said you're using the same version, I suspect it'd either be something else in your GMail settings (which you ruled out when the Incognito Window didn't exhibit the problem) or something in your Chrome profile.

I can see three potential sources for the problem on the client side:

1. Flawed extension. (Fixed by a new profile. Fixed by an Incognito Window unless you've chosen to allow the broken extension in Incognito.)
2. Corrupted profile. (Fixed by a new profile. Anybody's guess whether a given instance of corruption will be fixed by Incognito Window.)
3. Strange config tweak in your Chrome. (Fixed by a new profile. Not fixed by Incognito Window.)

Chrome has primitive support for running with multiple profiles which you can use for testing. There's a quick-and-dirty approach and a cleaner approach for long-term use.

Since you said the Incognito Window fixed it and you didn't mention any other problems in your Chrome, my guess is that it's probably a bug in one of your extensions that's causing the extension to grab the Tab keypress but then make the flawed assumption that injecting a tab character is the way to say "on second thought, use the browser's native handler after all".