This is apparently caused by something not in Chromium itself: it’s not reproducible in a VM running Oneiric, with 17.0.963.26 from ppa:chromium-daily/dev nor with Chrome 17.0.96356. It *is* reproducible in Precise with the latter too, but not reproducible with Firefox nor Epiphany. In Precise with Chromium 17, it’s reproducible with a temporary profile and a guest login also.

Then I would rephrase this into a bug report as follows: currently, the toolbar navigational buttons (previous, next) are positioned to the right from the location bar. This is inconsistent with what most users probably expect, which is the way they are located in a web browser.

The three web browsers I currently have installed on this system position these elements as follows:

1. Epiphany 3.2.1: previous, next buttons above the left end of location bar.
2. Firefox 9.0: previous, next buttons to the left from location bar.
3. Chromium 15.0.874.121: previous, next buttons to the left from location bar.

From my personal anecdotal evidence, with this background, I say suddenly finding the navigational buttons from the right end of the location bar in one app is undly arduous. Thus this bug’s title should be: Move the navigation buttons to the left of the location bar.

(IIRC this was also how the buttons were back in Gnome 2. If there was some usability reasoning behind moving them to the right, I’d be interested in reading about it.)