How To Disable Brave / Chrome Gestures On MacOS
Getting rid of the infuriating two-finger history swipe
Once again, I got caught out and lost a bunch of typed text because I accidentally two-finger swiped at too much of an angle while trying to scroll up and down. I don’t know who the sadist was that decided that swiping forward and back through browser history by default was a good idea, but at the precise moment that I watched the form I was filling out disappear, I wanted to be able to swipe that horrible person hard enough to send them through time…
I proceeded to search The Googles for a way to disable the gestures in the Brave browser (which is the same thing as Chrome, just better).
Links and more links to closed forum posts with no solutions. Like this one. Or this one. Here’s a Reddit post that’s been without a satisfying answer for 11 months*.
The Solution
On MacOS it’s possible to disable the back/forward gestures for Brave/Chrome by disabling them system-wide: in the Trackpad settings, under More Gestures, I turned Swipe between pages off and it looks like it’s done the trick!
PS. While writing this up, I came across this Medium article — a more targeted fix, but also more effort (I haven’t verified if it still works).
