How To Easily Disable Swipe To Go Back In Chrome On Touch Screens

Two-in-one laptops as tablets. The display screen on a two-in-one laptop is a touch display. You can tap your screen to open links, access to the menus, and use a myriad of swipe gestures. Some touchscreens will ever be sufficient enough to substitute a proper tablet. Some still can rival the display on a Surface tablet or the Surface Studio. It may, therefore, be as if the touchscreen on a tablet is a frivolous addition that is made to sell the device at a higher price. Well, that’s not true. If you have a touchscreen, you’ll like it. The gestures alone make it great. In Chrome, you can swipe left and right to go to the previous or next page in your history. If the swipe gestures make scrolling very difficult for you, however, you can disable swipe to go back in Chrome.

Disable Swipe To Go Back In Chrome Browser

Open your Chrome browser and paste the following in the URL bar.

chrome://banners/#overscroll-history-route

Open the drop-down under the ‘Overscroll history navigation ” flag, and select “Disable” from the options. Relaunch Chrome browser. You will not be able to swipe left or right from the edge of your screen to go to the previous or next page in your history.

This will work regardless if you’re using Chrome in tablet or Desktop mode. This is a setting that actually concerns Windows 10 users. Apple has not yet released a MacBook or Mac with a touchscreen so you won’t have this issue on macOS.

Backspace To Go Back

Only a couple of months ago Chrome, like every other browser let you go back to the previous page in your history by tapping the Backspace key. Unfortunately, the backspace key is likewise the same key we use to delete a character in a text input field. There was an obvious conflict between the keyboard shortcut and frequently, it brought about lost form data that a user had filled in.

To fix this conflict, Chrome has removed the backspace keyboard shortcut for going back. It has since been supplanted with the Alt+Left arrow key shortcut. Fortunately, Google has also released a Chrome extension that allows you to get the backspace shortcut to work again in Chrome. If you choose to disable swipe to go back in Chrome, you may want a more intuitive/convenient way to jump to the previous page. The extension is the easiest approach to do it if you would prefer not to use the Al+left arrow key shortcut.