Why can I not click on a blank area with chrome? - google-chrome

Question

I wanted to learn how to click on a blank area on a page using selenium. The commonly suggested method is to click the html element. This method fails with chrome, but not with firefox. Why does this happen and how do I fix it ?
import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
public class Temp {
private static final WebDriver browser = new ChromeDriver();
private static String url = "https://www.google.com/";
public static void main(String[] args) {
browser.get(url);
browser.findElement(By.tagName("html")).click();
}
}
Exception:
Starting ChromeDriver (v2.9.248315) on port 15072
Exception in thread "main" org.openqa.selenium.WebDriverException: unknown error: Failed to execute 'getComputedStyle' on 'Window': parameter 1 is not of type 'Element'.
(Session info: chrome=52.0.2743.116)
(Driver info: chromedriver=2.9.248315,platform=Windows NT 6.1 SP1 x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)
Command duration or timeout: 334 milliseconds
Session ID: 69ce4de350c6ade8abcbcd0b1b2093f6
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:408)
at org.openqa.selenium.remote.ErrorHandler.createThrowable(ErrorHandler.java:206)
at org.openqa.selenium.remote.ErrorHandler.throwIfResponseFailed(ErrorHandler.java:158)
at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver.execute(RemoteWebDriver.java:678)
at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebElement.execute(RemoteWebElement.java:327)
at org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebElement.click(RemoteWebElement.java:85)
at src.Temp.main(Temp.java:14)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:483)
at com.intellij.rt.execution.application.AppMain.main(AppMain.java:144)