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The Pitfall of Adding Keyboard Shortcuts to Web Apps

I’ve recently discovered a few keyboard shortcuts in Google Docs, Google’s office suite of applications. But unfortunately, I’ve stumbled onto them by accident while using a shortcut on my OS X operating system. When I tried to hide the browser window using the “Command + H” key combination, something unexpected happened. The “Find and Replace” window popped up inside the app:

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This is problematic because I still want to use my OS X command, but now it’s been overridden by Google. I think web application developers should be careful to check for at least the main window manipulation controls in the popular operating systems like Windows and OS X to make sure their keyboard shortcuts don’t block them.

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