TrackPad/TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation

Pesala

@weissi29 With nearly 2,800 feature requests, and a small team, those needed by few users or difficult to implement may have to wait for a long time. Wherever you see that a feature is tagged as In Progress, it may get done this year rather than next.

The low number of votes for the feature request is probably not the reason why it is not even tagged as Pipeline, let alone In Progress. It is probably because it takes a lot of work to fix. The developers are surely aware of the issue. They rarely reply here. Maybe one of the insiders like @Gwen-Dragon or @Ayespy will have some knowledge that I do not.

weissi29

@Pesala thx for your reply
please don't see it as a reproach, I was just puzzled about the lack of this feature (as it is requested for a long time)

is this feature not implemented/supported in Chromium itself? Chrome, Edge, Brave,... -> all are supporting the same touchpad behaviour.

Ayespy

@weissi29 They all have the same kind of UI, and Vivaldi does not. Vivaldi's UI is built completely separate from the rendering engine and the OS, and so everything negotiated by the UI (such as touch gestures) must be written from scratch by Vivaldi devs. The unique UI is the reason Vivaldi is able to have its feature set.

gianniskarmas

I am also missing this feature so much.
Going back and forth in history just with 2-finger swipe is crucial and every other browser has it.
Really how difficult it is to implement? You already have a gesture system in place.
This can be done in js with a 1-liner and a simple coordinates system by using Touchy :

if (finger1Start < finger1End && finger2Start < finger2End) History.back();

CSPGQQT

@chriscochrun Amazing that Vivaldi still does not support that? I would consider it to be top priority, if not # 1 priority. Vivaldi Devs, please forget everything that you have, drop everything and put everyone on this tiny feature, but most important feature.

BoneTone

@CSPGQQT said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

I would consider it to be top priority, if not # 1 priority.

You and (maybe) 25 other people. It's not even close to being in the top 100 outstanding most requested features. We all have our own personal pet features that we think are crucial, but no matter how much we individually want something that doesn't equal widespread demand. I too have my own features I wish Vivaldi would "drop everything" and implement for me.

@lucaspon said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

There must be a workaround to this, can someone share it?

Configure "History Back" to your preference in:

vivaldi://settings/mouse/

Not exactly the same, but a workaround.

syplex

@BoneTone said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

@CSPGQQT said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

I would consider it to be top priority, if not # 1 priority.

You and (maybe) 25 other people. It's not even close to being in the top 100 outstanding most requested features.

I have run across this issue several times and it took a decent amount of searching to find this specific thread, so I don't think that number is a fair representation.

Secondly, this is now core functionality. Like the back button on your mouse or the scroll wheel on your mouse not working. If most people don't report it, it is still core functionality that drives everyone crazy that is expecting it to function. More and more Windows laptops are being sold now with large functional touchpads where tiny ones were used in the past. No one would have done swipe gestures on crappy tiny touchpads of days past. But now we have large highly sensitive touchpads where this functionality has become commonplace. Expect to see this feature demanded more as people upgrade their laptops.

elknipso

Exactly so it is. This thread can't be found by almost anyone who is surprised about the missing functionality and therefore uninstalls Vivaldi completely in case of doubt.

I really don't understand what is so big about this topic, it's a basic function that Vivaldi has been missing for a long time. Such a major shortcoming can be called embarrassing.

Pesala

@elknipso I am surprised that people cannot find this thread.

Save this link: Touchpad as a web panel and edit the search string to find other topics.

This thread was the second of six search results. Ayespy explained above why this is not as easy to add as some people might think.

@Ayespy said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

Vivaldi's UI is built completely separate from the rendering engine and the OS, and so everything negotiated by the UI (such as touch gestures) must be written from scratch by Vivaldi devs.

jumpsq

@lucaspon said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

There must be a workaround to this, can someone share it?

Are you on Linux and X11 [1], and your touchpad supports multi-touch? Then you could just use libinput-gestures with its standard configuration to both navigate history back and forth using 3 finger touchpad gestures.
https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures

[1] or use xwayland to run Vivaldi - if you do not know, what this means, you likely do either of those

syplex

@Pesala said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

@elknipso I am surprised that people cannot find this thread.

Save this link: Touchpad as a web panel and edit the search string to find other topics.

This thread was the second of six search results. Ayespy explained above why this is not as easy to add as some people might think.

It doesn't show up as a primary result in the first page of search results for DuckDuckGo or Google search for vivaldi swipe back (DuckDuckGo, Google). But there are many postings on this and other forums about people seemingly having this same issue.

My adding this comment with the text vivaldi swipe back might change the search results in the future.

syplex

@BoneTone said in TrackPad/TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

@CSPGQQT said in TouchPad Gestures for History Navigation:

I would consider it to be top priority, if not # 1 priority.

You and (maybe) 25 other people. It's not even close to being in the top 100 outstanding most requested features. We all have our own personal pet features that we think are crucial, but no matter how much we individually want something that doesn't equal widespread demand. I too have my own features I wish Vivaldi would "drop everything" and implement for me.

I thought I'd give an update on the priority of this issue. I just checked and it is now in the Top-100 most-requested features for Vivaldi Desktop. It is currently #87.

Looking through the desktop feature request list, it appears there are about 22 in progress with 11 of those in progress having less votes than this issue.

*Updated position ranking to include sub-categories for desktop.

elknipso

Then there is still hope that Vivaldi will hopefully be upgraded with absolute basic functions in 2021.

elknipso

I can understand that, and I understand that it is an increased effort to program this function in Vivaldi.

However, it is really frustrating when you would like to use the browser and it fails because of such missing basic functions.

heunecke

As a workaround I made this script:

let isScrolling = false;
function setIsScrolling() {
  isScrolling = true;
  setTimeout(function () {
    isScrolling = false;
  }, 500);
}
window.addEventListener("scroll", setIsScrolling, { passive: true });

let gestureBackBlocked = false;
let gestureForwardBlocked = false;
let scrollSum = 0;
function doScroll({ deltaX }) {
  scrollSum += deltaX;

  if (scrollSum < -200 && !gestureBackBlocked && !isScrolling) {
    gestureBackBlocked = true;
    history.back();
    setTimeout(function () {
      gestureBackBlocked = false;
    }, 500);
  }

  if (scrollSum > 200 && !gestureForwardBlocked && !isScrolling) {
    gestureForwardBlocked = true;
    history.forward();
    setTimeout(function () {
      gestureForwardBlocked = false;
    }, 500);
  }

  setTimeout(function () {
    scrollSum = 0;
  }, 500);
}
window.addEventListener("wheel", doScroll, { passive: true });

You can inject it with Tampermonkey and set the userscript to match all sites (pattern *://*/*).

Known limitations:

Won't work on certain sites (e.g. Chrome web store and Vivaldi start page)
Scrolling fast horizontally in scrollbar areas may trigger the gesture

Update:

Added support for client side routing

0x49D1

after this you can press Alt + single finger touchpad action to complete the gesture.

pauloaguia

@0x49D1 As you can see from the original post, that feature already existed at the time.
The request is to support two finger gestures to avoid having to use the Alt key...

0x49D1

@pauloaguia ops, missed that, thanks. But still: in case you use trackpad: keyboard is near the left hand, so there seems no problem with reaching the Alt. With 2 fingers I don't see how can you use that rich number of available gestures.

pauloaguia

@0x49D1 Personally I already use two finger gestures for scrolling, so I probably wouldn't activate this feature in the first place. But there are people out there with only one hand, for whom I can see this would make quite a difference...

Pierric

+1 from me on this request. I use the keyboard extensively, and have quick shortcuts through Vimium, but when working with the laptop on my lap, the 2-finger back-and-forth is still very efficient and desirable.