Web Development and more

The trackpad of the MacBook (Air or Pro) is -IMHO- one of the best reasons for someone to buy this laptop. It’s improved gesture reading, increase productivity like on no other laptop that I know of at least.

Yet imagine the scenario that you are using Google Chrome to fill out a huge form. When you try to scroll down (using two fingers) you accidentally move them just a bit to the right.

And then disaster strikes! The browser interprets that move as a “back” command, and takes you back to the previous page!

Big deal... Push the “forward” button and you are right there where you were. And logically all your inputs are there too so you can continue as if nothing had happened... right? Well yes, (in most cases). However, I had this happening to me a few times in Google Adwords when I was creating a “responsive ad”. The browser took me back to the previous page and upon forward, all my ad data was gone!

It was not the first time something like that had happened, but at that time I decided to address that issue once and for all!

So, after a bit of searching I got two solutions:

Solution #1. System Preferences -> Trackpad -> uncheck “Swipe between pages” (this actually works fine if you want to cancel swiping back and forth on all browsers you may have installed)

Since I wanted to cancel swiping just for Chrome (as this is my main browser) and wanted to leave this functionality intact tor Safari and Firefox, I opted to the following solution 2.

Solution #2 Open a terminal window (yes, that black scary thing that if you don’t know what you’re typing you will get the annoying message “command not found”). In that terminal window type (in one single line):

defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool FALSE

(or better copy/paste it to avoid typos)

Now, the “scrolling with 2 fingers” functionality remained intact, yet this annoying “back” function is gone!