CrxMouse Gestures brings mouse gestures to your browser

As iOS and Android move to more gesture-driven systems, applying the same philosophy to our desktop browsers sounds like an easy way to speed up navigation on the web. While some may prefer buttons most of the time, there’s nothing wrong with having the choice to use gestures if you want to. CrxMouse Chrome Gestures provides that for the Chrome browser (and Microsoft Edge Chromium as well.)

Installing the extension adds a whole bunch of gestures that can be used with a mouse or a trackpad to navigate the web with ease. I was sceptical about it since Windows did have gesture-driven browser a while ago with Metro IE(spoilers: it didn’t work out), but these browsers require a little more deliberate action and are a little more intuitive than they seem at first.

For instance, to open a page in a new tab, users can hold and swipe briefly to the right as of tey were throwing the new tab into the blank space. To go back, a user can draw a reverse L and be thrown back to whatever page they were browsing, even if it were to be a new tab, and saving an image is as easy as dragging it slightly.

There are other nifty little gestures for actions like opening an image in a new tab or quickly searching text in your search engine of choice bringing it to a total of 22.

It’s available here from the Chrome Web Store.