How do I disable Chrome's two-finger back/forward navigation?

In dev builds of Chrome, they've implemented, refined, and released two-finger swipes left/right in order to browse back/forward in the browser history. Unfortunately, you can accidentally trigger it while you're in the middle of a long down/up scroll, which needless to say occurs often.

I generally like the gesture, and things like Preview, Safari, and other application have implemented it much better, where you cannot blindly navigate back/forward so long as you have begun to scroll up/down.

How do I selectively disable two-finger back/forward navigation in Chrome?


I know its over a year later, but I had the same question, and then figured out the answer myself.

Open terminal and type:

defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool FALSE

Then restart Chrome.

Now you can have it enabled system wide, and just disabled for chrome. By the way, this works for any app, just replace com.google.Chrome with the bundle identifier of the target app.

If your interested in how it works, the AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls is the global setting, that can be overwritten for any specified app.

Hope this helps someone in the future.


I went into the System Prefs and changed the Page change gesture from two fingers to three (OSX Lion). The three finger swipe seems to be more responsive at any rate and I'm usually only using two fingers for everything else.

System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures > Swipe between pages


There are two different properties, one is for the Trackpad: AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls, the other is for the Mouse/Magic Mouse: AppleEnableMouseSwipeNavigateWithScrolls.

So you need to execute one or both of these commands:

$ defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableMouseSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool false
$ defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool false