Context:
Swipe gestures (back/forward navigation) can be unintentionally triggered on trackpads and touch devices (testet on mac). It seems like it was a feature in past, but i couldn't find the comment again.

Several related issues discuss this behavior (in comments):

• Add better page forward/back gestures

  • Collaborator PalmerAL on Feb 29, 2020:

  Hmm, OK. I'm not seeing any way to detect the trackpad sensitivity to compensate for this; if it's a common issue, we could probably add a setting to manually adjust the amount of movement required, but it sounds like it would be fine to leave it as-is for now.

• Trackpad gestures are too sensitive

  • strindhaug on May 22, 2024:

  Option to disable this misfeature is really needed! [...]

• Indicator showing when page is about to go to previous page

  • strindhaug on May 22, 2024:

  Still ridiculously sensitive on Mac touchpad [...]

• IanDLacy on Feb 3, 2022:

  Is there a way to disable this behavior entirely?

Proposal:
Introduce a user setting to disable swipe gestures. This gives users who don’t want gesture navigation a simple opt-out.

Implementation sketch:

• webviewGestures.js line 91
  Current guard:

  if (isInFrame) { return }

  Suggested change:

  if (isInFrame || isSwipeSettingDisabled) { return }

• index.html (Settings UI, maybe placed below the autoplay toggle):

  <div class="setting-section" id="section-disable-swipe">
    <input type="checkbox" id="checkbox-disable-swipe" />
    <label
      for="checkbox-disable-swipe"
      data-string="settingsDisableSwipeGestures"
    >
      Disable swipe gestures for navigating backward and forward
    </label>
  </div>

• settings.js
  Add after the autoplay setting some sort of event listener. I don't now how, e.g.

  /* swipe gestures disable setting */
  settings.get('disableSwipeGestures', function (value) {
    disableSwipeCheckbox.checked = !!value
  })
  disableSwipeCheckbox.addEventListener('change', function () {
    settings.set('disableSwipeGestures', this.checked)
  })

UX copy:
“Disable swipe gestures for navigating backward and forward”.

This is a good-faith suggestion aimed at improving usability. I noticed there are many comments scattered across related issues, but no dedicated thread, so I created this one. Related topics include user feedback about backward/forward navigation and requests for sensitivity adjustments. I’m happy to adapt the naming, placement, or wording to match project conventions, and I fully understand if the maintainers prefer a different approach or decide not to include it.