Improve Your Browsing Experience With Mouse Gestures
Sometimes the best ideas come from less widely used and more niche browsers. Take, for example, mouse gestures, which allow you to perform actions such as going back a page or closing a tap by swiping your mouse (or swiping on your trackpad). This means you don’t have to constantly look at your keyboard for key combinations or search for a toolbar button or menu item on the screen. Once you get used to them, mouse gestures can really speed up your browsing experience.
Browsers like Opera and Vivaldi are pioneers of these most useful features, but luckily, you can also enable them in well-known alternatives (including Chrome and Safari) using third-party extensions.
Mouse gestures in Opera and Vivaldi.
Full marks to Opera and Vivaldi – as we ‘ve written before , these browsers are packed with useful, innovative features, and many of them are missing or more limited in functionality in the browsers from the biggest tech companies. Mouse gestures are built into both Opera and Vivaldi, so there’s no need to download an extension.
In Opera, click the Easy Setup icon in the top right corner (it looks like three horizontal sliders), then select Go to full browser settings . Scroll down to find and turn on the Enable Mouse Gestures toggle, then follow the Learn More link to learn what they do.
Start with the basics: hold the right mouse button and move left to go back, or hold the right mouse button and move down to open a new tab (note that you need to perform these steps on a blank area of the current web page). You’ll also see so-called “rocker” gestures, which are activated by rocking between the right and left mouse buttons.
In Vivaldi, you can get to the mouse gestures feature by clicking the Settings button (the gear icon at the bottom left corner) and then going to the Mouse tab. Turn on “Allow gestures to trigger mouse gestures” or “Perform gestures with the Alt key” if you’re using a trackpad (this means the Alt key triggers gestures, not the right mouse button).
Vivaldi gives you more control over gestures than Opera, as you can edit and delete specific gestures, as well as add your own. You can also change the sensitivity of gestures and enable rocking gestures using both mouse buttons. Use the Restore Default Gestures button to discard any changes and start over.
Click on any gesture to see a preview – so tabs can be closed by holding down the right mouse button and then moving it down and to the right, for example. You’ll soon get a feel for how they work, and once you’ve ingrained them into muscle memory, they’ll become a much faster and more intuitive way of doing things in your browser.
Mouse gestures in other browsers
Third-party extension developers have thankfully filled the gap when it comes to mouse gestures in more popular browsers. The experience isn’t as smooth as Opera and Vivaldi, which have these features built in, but you can get a pretty close approximation using an add-on.
Chromium
If you are using Google Chrome, then one of the best options is CrxMouse Chrome Gestures . Once you add it to your browser, you can play a cute little arcade game to get the hang of the basics, then click the extension icon in the toolbar to see the available gestures, and access an extensive list of settings – you can do it. everything from changing the appearance of the mouse pointer to enabling on-screen gesture traces.
In the “Mouse Gestures” section on the extension settings page, you can see all the current gestures, make changes to them if necessary, and add your own. You can also change the button or key used to enable these gestures (the default is the right mouse button). You can even assign certain gestures to only work on certain sites.
Microsoft Edge
Since Microsoft Edge is built on Chromium, it can also use Chrome-compatible extensions such as CrxMouse Chrome Gestures. Another option is SmartUp Gestures , which also offers a lot of options for experimentation: for example, you can change the appearance of gestures on the screen, as well as edit the gestures themselves.
Fire Fox
If you’re a Firefox user, Gesturefy is a great choice for complementing mouse gestures. It comes with a very clean and accessible interface for managing and editing the enabled gestures, as well as a lot of useful additions: gesture tracking, deactivation key option, ability to disable gestures on certain sites, and support for rocker gestures. .
Safari
Finally, for Safari users, there’s the appropriately named Mouse Gestures for Safari . The add-on gives you the ability to customize enabled gestures, display visual representations of gestures on screen, and change the motion sensitivity required to trigger an action with a mouse gesture.