Thanks for the report. Confirmed in latest Canary.

Sounds like a Pri-2 MacViews bug. Marking as available, targetting M-70, +cc ellyjones.

This behavior was intentional to match middle-clicking in the omnibox dropdown.  The reverting of the omnibox in the other cases is because we're changing the foreground tab and thus "completing" the in-progress action, but command-enter is leaving you in the current omnibox on the current page and thus doesn't need to do this.

It's not obvious to me what's correct here, so I'd instead ask: can you give the use case/usage flow for when command-enter comes in handy, where one of the other options (e.g. option-enter, middle-clicking in dropdown) isn't as useful?  Perhaps this can guide us.

Sure! I hope this doesn't get too long.

Really, there isn't much of a strong reason. I've already switched to option-enter instead. But I could make a case for consistency.

1)

I'm in the habit of _always_ pressing command-enter to open a URL in a new tab, and never opening a new tab and pressing unmodified enter. The reason for this is I do not want the new tab page in my back button history. If I'm using a single-page app such as Gmail or Twitter, then the back button becomes part of the application context. If I accidentally go back to the new tab page and have to wait for Gmail to reload, that's a waste of my time. So I've long been preventing that transition by opening typed URLs in a new tab.

For what it's worth, Firefox (and Safari) distinguishes between the "Blank page" and the feature-rich "Favorites / Home / Start Page" as a choice for what you can see when opening a new tab or a new window. If the tab was showing a blank page, then navigating somewhere will not keep the blank page in the back button history.

Chrome doesn't have that, so even though I have a "blank new tab page" extension running, that still ends up in the back button history. So I use command-enter much much more than regular enter, so I encountered this behavior pretty much constantly, and I quickly began to wonder what anyone would want with these omnibox suggestions after having already picked one.

But if there's some use case where it's reasonable to leave the suggestions up after having already picked one, then that's that. I've already switched to option+enter.

2)

The command modifier key opens links in new tabs both when typing in the omnibox and when clicking on links in a page. The option modifier key opens links in a new tab from the omnibox, but it starts a download instead when clicking a link in a page. I've accidentally downloaded a few things during the past week, trying to retrain my muscle memory. So that's an argument for command+enter to do something relatively "normal".

Another option: Just tried in safari, and command+enter opens a new tab, command+shift+enter opens a foreground tab, and option+enter downloads (???) the typed URL. So I could make the case for command+shift+enter doing what I consider the "weird" behavior here, and command+enter doing the normal thing.

(Also, in all cases Safari removes focus from the URL box, which I feel is correct, but again, I can't imagine what the use case is where I'd want to open one of the pages but keep typing/editing.)

And if this is supposed to be some sort of "feature", when I'm not using a three-button mouse there's no way to access it by clicking, so there would have to be some keyboard shortcut.

> But if there's some use case where it's reasonable to leave the suggestions up after having already picked one, then that's that. I've already switched to option+enter.

In my mind, there's a good use case here, which is the same as middle-click. It seems to me that the very reason I'm opening the tab in the background is that I want to continue working in the foreground. In the case of opening omnibox suggestions, this would be so I could open more than one of the suggested pages or queries.

I'm inclined to make this WontFix unless ellyjones has other thoughts.

 Issue 881951  has been merged into this issue.