I’m on Mac 15.7.1 and Brave 1.83.118 / Chromium 141.0.7390.108.
When a user presses Tab to navigate through the address bar suggestions (history, search suggestions, etc.), the focus lands not only on each suggestion item but also on the little “X” (delete/remove suggestion) button on the right side of each suggestion when the URL was previously visited.
This doubles the number of presses needed to get from one suggestion to the next.
This requires the user to anticipate which URL suggestions are actually historical and know that they need to hit Tab twice to move through that line in the suggested list, which is not intuitive or quick.
It increases the chance of accidentally “selecting” the “X” (especially if the user then hits Enter expecting the main suggestion), which causes the suggestion to be deleted unintentionally. This happens to me very frequently.
The behavior is frustrating and disrupts keyboard‐only or keyboard‐heavy workflows – while users could use the down arrow key to avoid this behavior, it is a less convenient and natural key to use for many people.
Users note that Firefox has an option to disable this behavior: e.g. browser.urlbar.resultMenu.keyboardAccessible = false in about:config.
Recommendation:
Change the default behavior to not select the “X” button or introduce a feature to remove this functionality so users can select the behavior they want.
Good job on being persistant in asking for help, it’s easy for many posts to be overlooked due to how many posts are created…
Anyway, I’m on macOS 26.1 with Brave 1.84.132 / Chromium: 142.0.7444.60
(You didn’t specify or at least I missed it on which versions of OS or Brave your are using and didn’t add any tags).
and when I click: (control ⌃) + (tab ⇥) and/or with (shift ⇧) to go back
I don’t get this behaviour…
I could guess that you are using Windows and it’s working differently…
So with that might I ask, have you made any modfications to your shortcuts found in: brave://settings/system/shortcuts & maybe seach “Tab” in the Seach for a command or shortcut field
to see if that could make any difference?
Maybe it’s an OS thing (and if it is maybe see what you can do within your OS) but if you haven’t checked there, wouldn’t hurt to try…
Thanks for the reply! I’m on Mac 15.7.1 and Brave 1.83.118 / Chromium 141.0.7390.108.
To clarify, I’m not going through tabs in my use case. That works properly when I use (control ⌃) + (tab ⇥) like you mentioned. What I’m doing is moving through the suggested website/history website list when I am in a new tab and start typing a website name.
For example, I open a new tab and type in “Google” or some other website name which I have been to before and a list appears below that which shows some suggestions (google maps, etc) along with some websites I have been to before like a Google Doc for example. I then click tab repeatedly to move through this list, but the focus first lands on the first website in the list below (expected), but then, if I have been to the website before, it moves to the “X” icon on the right side, which, if I hit enter, will actually remove this website from my history (unexpected!). If I continue to hit tab, it alternates between these two, but only if that website has been historically gone to, which makes it hard to use this feature quickly/easily.
Given that the “X” (Remove from history) is likely a very lightly utilized feature compared with just using tab to move through the list of historical and suggested sites, I was thinking the behavior should be changed to not target focus on the “X” and instead just go through the list in order.
I added my OS and Brave version – thanks for reminding me!
Regarding the up/down arrow option: I know that the up/down arrows work for this, but 1. other browsers allow you to continue to use tab to move through elements in that list so it makes switching to Brave harder since it may be learned behavior and 2. this probably seems dumb, but tab just an easier / more efficient button to tap since you can keep your hands on the keyboard. Using the down arrow is more disruptive, for me at least.
Well haha… one reason why I wasn’t experiencing it was that I had Browsing History unselected in the Show autocomplete suggestions in address bar option. (Another reason maybe because of the first reason, I completely misunderstood what you were referring to )
I obviously personally don’t use it in the same way you do but I am seeing what you are saying now and understand how that little “X” selection option (though slightly highlighted when on it) can cause trouble when trying to move quickly through the list.
Having an option of turning that off I can understand the want and benefit.
I could imagine most people using that functionality are not using it to REMOVE things from the list but to just GET to things in the list (as you do).
So maybe Brave could create a FLAG (at least to start with) to turn on or off
On a side note, since you mentioned you’re on 15.7.1, I thought I’d mention that Apple has released 15.7.2 and 26.1 if you wanted to update macOS
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