Over twenty years ago, the Opera browser got me hooked on mouse gestures, a way for you to perform common browser actions quickly. After I joined the IE team in 2004, I fell in love with a browser extension written by Ralph Hare and I later blogged about it on the IEBlog and helped Ralph get it running in 64bit IE.
Many years passed. By 2015, I had abandoned the outdated IE and moved to Chrome fulltime. When I joined the Chrome team in 2016, I was heartened to note that mouse gestures were one of the very few features slated for inclusion in the first version of Chrome. They were repeatedly postponed and eventually cut, with the idea that perhaps a browser extension was the way to go. I installed the most popular Mouse Gestures extension from the Chrome web store only to later discover that it was sending my browser traffic to a questionable server in China. I uninstalled it and reported it to the Chrome Web Store folks who delisted it. Apparently a while later they slightly reduced the data leakage and got it back up on the Web Store, and in 2019 a new hire PM lead on the Edge team suggested we all install it. I took a look at what it was doing and found that it was still engaged in questionable privacy practices. Bummer.
Fast forward to earlier this year, when I discovered that the Edge team has landed gestures in Edge on Windows! I was excited to see the implementation, and feel like it’s one of several features that makes Edge feel like it’s a batteries-included browser. (Unfortunately, this feature presently seems to be Windows-only. If you’re using a Mac or Linux, you should click the menu … >Help and Feedback > Send Feedback to ask for it.)
Dozens (hundreds?) of times a day, I enjoy the satisfaction of closing browser tabs by right-click-drawing a “L” on them.
To enable Mouse Gestures support in Edge, simply visit edge://flags/#edge-mouse-gesture and enable the feature:
After you restart the browser you can go visit the edge://settings/mouseGesture page to configure them:
Don’t worry about memorizing a ton of shortcuts — I really only use two: back (right-click+left-drag) and close tab (right-click+DrawL).
I smile every time this works, and every time I test something in Chrome I lament their absence.
-Eric
PS: Besides support for Mac OS, one other missing feature I’d love to see is the ability to bind a gesture to an extension or JavaScript-bookmarklet. That would allow me to recreate one of my other IE-era gestures– I could waggle my mouse to run a JavaScript which would remove all ad-like elements from a page.
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That wouldn’t work for me, because I’m a compulsive highlighter 🤣
Do you somehow highlight with the right mouse button?
No, with the left. I didn’t read carefully so I thought the gestures where done with the left button. So I guess it could work for me after all!
The gestures that Opera really hooked me with were the back/forward gestures:
Back: Hold right mouse button and tap left mouse button
Forward: Hold left mouse button and tap right mouse button. If the forward history buffer is empty, try to find a “next” button of some sort and click it.
Where this really shined was for reading webcomics, since it was so much easier to use the forward gesture than to keep the mouse positioned over the next button.
I think these might have been called rocker navigations. In the current Edge version, you can simply swipe right and left, but I don’t think the “hunt for a Next link” feature exists yet.