[ygra]

We're creatures of habit. In this case it's a behaviour that existed for two decades or so. Sure, it doesn't make much sense, but the same goes for various functions of the middle mouse button, depending on context: open new tab, close tab, open new application, close window, scroll, paste. Yet you don't see anyone changing those.

[bobajeff]

That's because those shortcuts don't usually end up losing all user input if somehow focus got moved off of the text entry field.

This is a change that should've happened a long time ago.

[Aldo_MX]

> Yet you don't see anyone changing those.

Except for (guess who?) Chromium...

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=255

[Klathmon]

They aren't removing middle click, they are just making it not fire off an onclick javascript event (to match the behavior of all other browsers).