The Touchscreen Takeover
If you are using Google Chrome on a Windows tablet, a 2-in-1 hybrid device (like a Microsoft Surface), or a laptop with a touch-enabled screen, Chrome attempts to be touch-friendly. By default, the moment you tap inside any text field, search bar, or form on a webpage, Chrome signals Windows to automatically slide the large, on-screen virtual keyboard up from the bottom of the screen. This is helpful if you are holding the device like a tablet, but if you have a physical keyboard attached and merely touched the screen to click a specific text box, having half your display obscured by a digital keyboard you don’t need is highly disruptive.
Suppressing the Virtual Keyboard
To retain visibility of your web pages and stop Google Chrome from automatically opening the on-screen keyboard when you tap a text field, you must disable a specific Chrome experimental flag.
Open Google Chrome and click on the address bar at the very top. Type chrome://flags and press Enter. This will open Chrome’s hidden experimental features menu. In the search box at the top of the Flags page, type Virtual Keyboard. Look through the results for a specific flag titled Enable Virtual Keyboard (or similar wording depending on your exact Chrome version). Click the dropdown menu next to this flag, which is likely set to “Default,” and change it to Disabled. A blue “Relaunch” button will appear at the bottom of the screen. Click it to restart Chrome. The browser will no longer trigger the Windows on-screen keyboard.