Unfortunately, this appears to be a Chrome (Webkit?) bug. I'm not actually sure why it does what it's doing but with the current systems, I don't think we can do anything about it.
It's actually changing the HTML structure. Initially, your coloring was inside the link, so it overwrote the link color; when you press backspace, the HTML gets re-written so the color gets moved outside (meaning the link color applies). This doesn't appear to be anything that we're triggering.