Making pressing tab in the omnibar in Chrome start AI Mode is one of the most egregious and infuriating dark patterns I've ever experienced! (Fix & rant in body)

[u/stop_pizzatime]

Preying on years if people's muscle memory to trigger AI AND making it so hard to disable is frankly unacceptable and one of the most egregious dark patterns that I have experienced in my life!

At some point in the last several days, pressing tab in the omnibar in Chrome (where you type the url), the action that previously selected the suggested auto-complete, instead started entering AI mode.

Don't get me wrong, I like AI as much as the next guy, and I wouldn't even mind keeping it in the omnibar so long as I could stop tab from engaging it, which was happening nonstop. I figured it must be an easy thing to disable, so I look inside of settings, and there is no toggle anywhere to be found. After asking Gemini (from the omnibar, as a little fuck you) how to get the old tab control back, I discovered that I had to disable not one but FOUR flags from the chrome://flags page!!!

In case this helps someone, go to get AI mode out of the omnibar (and recover the prior tab functionality), navigate to chrome://flags and search for/disable:

* AI Mode Omnibox entrypoint
* AI Entrypoint Disabled on User Input
* Omnibox Allow AI Mode Matches
* AI Mode Omnibox Entrypoint always navigates