Make Gestures Work in Chrome

Using Wayland on Linux opens up some touchpad gestures, such as using two fingers to swipe back in Firefox. Google Chrome can do the same thing!

All you need is to add a flag to the application’s launcher file:

--enable-features=TouchpadOverscrollHistoryNavigation

To implement this permanently (and why wouldn’t you?), copy the default launcher file. This ensures that even with package updates, the change will remain in place. For example, it should like the code below, subbing the specific browser in for [BROWSER_FILE].

cp /usr/share/applications/[BROWSER_FILE].desktop ~/.local/share/applications/[BROWSER_FILE].desktop

My interest is in enabling gestures in Google Chrome so I use this code:

cp /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

After updating, a small update needs to be patched in. Edit the launcher file by using this command. Nano works well but you could also try the built in text editor gnome-text-editor.

nano ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Replace this line:

Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable %U

With this:

Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --enable-features=TouchpadOverscrollHistoryNavigation %U

Make sure you do this for all Exec= lines.

The final step is to restart Gnome. You can log out and back in but I prefer to just restart my computer.