Last month, we told you about an issue with Google Chrome, whereas the keyboard would not appear when you tried to use it while in tablet mode. If you don’t remember, the problem was that with Chrome, the on-screen keyboard wouldn’t appear when in tablet mode. We also found that in Desktop mode, without keyboard attached to the Surface, the onscreen keyboard would not launch (even if you manually started it via the keyboard icon in the tray).
Well, it took them about a month but Google finally released version 50 of the Chrome browser and it seems to resolve that problem. All you have to do is update your version of Chrome. If you wait a few days, it should happen on it’s own (in theory). However, if you’re impatient or if it’s not happening automatically, you might want to run the update manually.
Finally, a Fix for Chrome On-Screen Keyboard Issues: Check/Update Chrome Manually
To manually trigger the update, just do these steps:
- Start Chrome browser.
- Select the Options menu in the upper right corner of the Chrome window then go to Help then About Google Chrome.
- If your Surface has already downloaded version 50 of Chrome it will tell you that version 50.0.2661.75.m is installed and that “Google Chrome is up to date.”
- If it’s not up to date, you should get a UAC popup asking if you want to allow the Google Update process to run. Select YES.
- The update process will run.
- When the update is installed, you’ll have to relaunch Chrome. You can do it manually by closing and reopening Chrome, or you can select the Relaunch button which will restart Chrome and reopen any tabs you have open. Be sure that all of your Chrome windows (in case you have multiple ones open), get relaunched.
Now when you use Chrome while in tablet mode, it should bring up the keyboard normally, when you tap on a text field (like the address bar). However, if you are using your Surface without a keyboard attached but Windows 10 is in Desktop Mode, IT WILL NOT automatically bring up the keyboard.
This seems to be by design since going into the Chrome Flags and setting the Enable Touch Events option to Enabled seems to resolve the problem.
To do this do the following:
- Open Chrome browser.
- Enter “Chrome://Flags” and press Enter.
- Find Enable Touch Events Mac Windows, Linux, Chrome OS option – you can search by using CTR+F keyboard shortcut
- By default, it’s set to Automatic. Select Enabled in the pull-down option. Then restart Chrome.
This should do it. Hopefully, now the onscreen keyboard will come up any time you are in Chrome.
Tim
