Google has been introducing nifty features to its various services with the aim of improving user experience, especially during one-hand use. Earlier this year, the search giant added support for new gestures on the YouTube app for iOS that allow users to swipe right to return to the previously watched video or left in order to play the next recommended clip.
In November of last year, it was also found via a commit on the Chromium Gerrit that Google was working on gesture-based navigation for Chrome that would let users go back and forth through their browsing history with left and right swipe actions. It now appears that those swipe gestures have gone live for both the beta and stable versions of the web browser.
As spotted by Android Police, the swipe gestures can only be enabled via hidden flags in the browser. In order to activate the feature, head over to the chrome://flags/#enable-gesture-navigation and then enable the "History navigation with gesture" flag.
Once the flag is turned on, users can return to the previous page they"ve opened by swiping from left to right or go forward by swiping from right to left, assuming they"re not on the latest webpage in the tab history.
The feature is also available on Chrome Canary and Chrome Dev versions. It can be enabled via the chrome://flags/#overscroll-history-nagivation flag.
Source: Android Police