Gestures

Steffie

One feature I hope to see in Vivaldi Android is the UI screen interface incorporating finger gestures. My mobile browser of choice for years is Sleipnir. It's far from perfect, but it has two killer features that none of the others I've tried have: Tab Groups, & Gestures.

On the latter, browsing is made highly efficient, much more so than the antiquated paradigm used by e.g., Ghostery, Brave & Firefox where the user has to specifically change screen view from active tab to the tab overview, manually select the next opened tab to read, then bring it to foreground. To refresh the page another disjointed finger relocation is needed.

By contrast in Sleipnir I merely have to swipe the screen right or left to change to the next or previous open tab in the current group [& multiple independent groups are possible, limited only [but not trivially, sob sniff] by RAM], draw a circle on-screen to refresh, apply various other finger gestures for other actions. With the Sleipnir paradigm my browsing is much more pleasant than the others. I'm baffled why nobody else has mimicked, ahem "borrowed", this design... but I hope Vivaldi will seriously consider it.

//MODEDIT: merged duplicated requests

pafflick

@steffie This all cool and fancy but would you be kind enough to, ahem "post only one feature request per topic"? Or at least "Choose a clear and concise title for the topic" (like eg. "Finger Gestures" or "Tab Groups").
Thank you

LonM

@pafflick I feel like in this case they are intertwined. E.g. "gestures for tab groups".

But yes, gestures and tab groups would be two individual requests

pafflick

@lonm said in Finger Gestures & Tab Groups.:

I feel like in this case they are intertwined.

I think it's not the case when you consider the following:

@steffie said in Finger Gestures & Tab Groups.:

draw a circle on-screen to refresh, apply various other finger gestures for other actions

sdlzhd

On the PC version of the Vivaldi browser, I really like the mouse gesture function. Are you planning to bring similar functionality to Android?
We can do specific functions with multiple fingers, such as opening a new tab, closing the tab, switching tabs, etc.

luetage

@sdlzhd Switching tabs is already a swipe on the bottom bar. The problem with doing one finger gestures over a webpage is that the webpage will move. Opera touch has that covered quite neatly by foregoing a bottom bar and replacing it with a touch/swipe button. A similar mechanism would be needed to distinguish between scrolling and gesture. Current operation is fine, although a bit inconsistent in places. The only thing I'm really missing is a way to close the current tab without going to the tab overview and hitting a close button.

LonM

Similar request : https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/32021/

luetage

@LonM What if I don't want tab groups?

LonM

@luetage fair point - I re opened the request

BoneTone

@luetage said in Gestures:

@sdlzhd Switching tabs is already a swipe on the bottom bar.

Or the top toolbar... swiping left/right on either toolbar will switch tabs. This is really nice as when I'm doing research and need to bookmark a large number of tabs, sometimes it is easier to swipe at the top, others at the bottom. As usual, Vivaldi's flexibility allows me to work using the best method at that time.

When it comes to a more broad gesture feature, I made this point in a similar feature request thread, but it's not nearly as straightforward to implement as it might seem. Accounting for all the different devices and swipe features available, especially as Android 10 is adopted, is going to be a very large endeavor.

I am using a tool that brings the swipe functionality to Android 9 that will be in 10. Vivaldi would need to capture these gestures in addition to the ones already familiar.

swiping straight in from the left edge and lifting
swiping diagonally up from the left edge and lifting
swiping diagonally down from the left edge and lifting
swiping straight in from the left edge and holding
swiping diagonally up from the left edge and holding
swiping diagonally down from the left edge and holding
swiping straight in from the right edge and lifting
swiping diagonally up from the right edge and lifting
swiping diagonally down from the right edge and lifting
swiping straight in from the right edge and holding
swiping diagonally up from the right edge and holding
swiping diagonally down from the right edge and holding

Each of those gestures above are assigned to different actions, such as: toggle flashlight, launch Vivaldi, launch the file manager, screenshot, Home, Recents, Previous App, and many other things can be assigned.

This is separate from the Edge Panels built-in to my phone. I have adjusted the area of the right edge that is used for the actions above, versus opening the Edge Panel.

Swiping up from the bottom will either open my apps drawer if I'm on the home screen, bring up a special notification manager if done in a certain way, swiping down brings opens my regular notifications.

Um, I probably have other global swiping actions that I use but this illustrates the difficulty of implementing this feature. This is only for dealing with my phone, other classes of phones probably have different swipe setups.

sdlzhd

@luetage Yeah, I just found this feature.

sdlzhd

@bonetone said in Gestures:

Or the top toolbar... swiping left/right on either toolbar will switch tabs. This is really nice as when I'm doing research and need to bookmark a large number of tabs, sometimes it is easier to swipe at the top, others at the bottom. As usual, Vivaldi's flexibility allows me to work using the best method at that time.

On some browsers, they do some things by long pressing the tab, such as closing the current tab.

sdlzhd

@LonM You are right, given the amount of discussion here, I still decided to reply to the post here.
On some browsers, they do some things by long pressing the tab, such as closing the current tab. More, can we implement more functions by long pressing some buttons on the toolbar?

BoneTone

@sdlzhd said in Gestures:

@bonetone said in Gestures:

Or the top toolbar... swiping left/right on either toolbar will switch tabs. This is really nice as when I'm doing research and need to bookmark a large number of tabs, sometimes it is easier to swipe at the top, others at the bottom. As usual, Vivaldi's flexibility allows me to work using the best method at that time.

On some browsers, they do some things by long pressing the tab, such as closing the current tab.

That would not be as efficient as Vivaldi's current design. If you just want to close the current tab, it might be nice, I'd have to think about how it fits with the current gestures in Vivaldi. But after that process you quoted, I'll have 30-100+ tabs to close.

Vivaldi's current design has so far been the easiest for doing it - open the tabs, look at what the top tab of the group that I want to close looks like (because I usually have tabs I don't want to close above that), scroll to the bottom and start tapping the close X button on the left bottom tab. As a tab closes, the next moves into place and I just watch for that top tab to come down into view and then stop.

In the time it would take to long press two tabs closed I probably close about 8 tabs, maybe a dozen. I don't know if they had my use case in mind when designing the tabs interface, but it's the fastest I've used on a phone thus far.

sdlzhd

@bonetone The current design is really convenient when closing a large number of tabs. But the phone screen is too big now , so it’s difficult to close the tab by one hand. We better find one that is easy to operate with one hand.

BoneTone

I've been thinking about the gestures in Vivaldi Android, and how to expand them to include popular feature requests. Here is what I've come up with, and the reasoning behind the design. Please like this post if you think the gestures should be expanded using a design like this, and comment with any feedback you may have.

There are 5 new actions added with this design change. They are:

History back
History forward
Open new tab
Close active tab
Create bookmark with active page

In deciding what gestures should be used for each action the are several considerations to take into account. Android has operating system level gestures already, and I've read that version 10 will be expanding these. It is important to not collide with these gestures as that would both confuse users, and possibly break functionality. Vivaldi also has gestures already; where possible new gestures should adhere to the design paradigm for these gestures to remain consistent - increasing discoverability & ease of use, and incorporating deliberate decisions on factors that may not be immediately evident. Lastly, Vivaldi Android is used on devices with little screen real estate. While large tablets may be able to take advantage of more gestures, the entire set of gestures should be designed with the limitations of these minimal devices in mind. Vivaldi is not going to maintain separate browsers for tablets and phones, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Before assigning new gestures to the chosen actions, let's take a look at the existing gestures in the operating system and browser itself. Starting with the OS, Android gestures are mostly global, meaning they work in every context - on every screen of every app, possibly even the lock screen if configured that way.

Drag down from top of screen - commonly open notifications
Drag up from bottom of screen - commonly used in the home screen context to open the apps list/drawer. This is the only non-global Android gesture listed in this post.

The following gestures are available currently using add-ons from manufacturers, but some if not all may become standard in Android in version 10.

Drag in from right or left edge:
- Straight in and lift
- Straight in and hold
- Diagonally upwards and lift
- Diagonally upwards and hold
- Diagonally downwards and lift
- Diagonally upwards and hold

That's 12 different gestures: 6 from each side edge, 3 with a lift before stopping the drag, 3 stopping and holding until the action is invoked - the groups of 3 being differentiated by direction of swipe. The area along the edge from which the gesture begins is configurable as is the length of that area.

The last Android global gesture I want to mention currently exists in Android 9 (and perhaps earlier versions, I can't recall). The Edge Panel is invoked with a swipe gesture from a side edge. Which side is configurable as is the position & length along the edge from which the gesture begins. There may be more gestures as part of the Android operating system, please let me know if I missed any.

When the 15 edge gestures above are combined, dragging in from the edge is pretty much saturated. The side that has the Edge Panel has two areas that invoke different actions depending on where the gesture begins, the OS doesn't let them overlap.

It would be a bit cluttered and also a technical challenge for Vivaldi to insert itself into the mix with gestures that drag in from the side edges. Similarly, dragging down from the top is for notifications, something that is very important for users to always be able to access. Additionally, Vivaldi already has downward gestures that are discussed next. So gestures that drag in from an edge are not an option for the design of Vivaldi Android.

Vivaldi Android has at least 2 existing gestures. They both drag downwards from the top toolbar. Where you begin the gesture determines the action invoked.

Drag down from address bar - opens the speed dial.
Drag down from the Vivaldi icon - opens the menu.

Using this paradigm, we can add 3 gesture by dragging upwards from the bottom toolbar. More than 3 gestures would be crowded. The 3 gestures are:

Drag up from tabs icon
Drag up from bookmarks icon
Drag up from the middle of the toolbar

Intuitively, the first gesture, drag up from the tab icon, would create a new tab and open it. This is a much faster and easily discoverable way, once gestures are known, to open a new tab rather than clicking the tab icon then clicking the plus icon. Especially considering that there may need to be more actions if the user previously had tabs open to the cloud, or history - first the user needs to switch back to the local tabs list. Instead of 3 clicks through a changing UI, the user simply swipes up from the tab icon.

The second gesture, drag up from bookmarks icon, lends itself elegantly to creating a new bookmark (or edit the existing one). Again, once the gestures feature is known, this is an easily discoverable gesture for a commonly used feature. When browsing the web, the toolbars disappear. To create a new bookmark the user needs to bring them back by scrolling down. After doing so their thumb or finger is near the bottom, not the top of the screen where the Vivaldi icon is to open the menu where the star is to currently create a new bookmark (or edit an existing one).

The final gesture that involves swiping up from the bottom toolbar is defined by swiping up from the center of the bottom toolbar. This is where the Speed Dial icon is. Currently opening the Speed Dial is assigned to the swipe down from address bar gesture. If we were to leave that as is, then the new action assigned to this gesture should be "close the active tab" as this is a highly requested feature - one that people want to use a gesture to do.

However, a more elegant design might be to move the Speed Dial action to this gesture, swipe up from the Speed Dial, and assign closing the active tab to the swipe down from address bar gesture. It's this bit of design that I think would benefit from discussion among a larger group within the development team (product management and quality assurance included), as well as feedback from the community.

The last two new gestures included in this design change suggestion/feature request are for the actions History Back & History Forward. As was detailed at the beginning of this post, Android itself has a pretty strong grip on swipes in from the edges. To avoid colliding with those, these gestures should begin in the middle of the screen and swipe off of the edge. Swipe from middle of screen and off the left edge for back, and off the right edge for forward. Middle of the screen can be defined as a box that makes sense, perhaps 25% in from every edge, that detail needs to be investigated.

The important thing to note here is that swiping left & right is currently used to scroll the page horizontally when it is larger than the screen. These movements will sometimes be small, repositioning the page just a little bit to align the page as the user desires. So the gesture when scrolling then begins & ends on the screen. The paradigm here maintains that scrolling pages must always begin & end on the screen. To scroll a lot the user will likely flick. Though scrolling large amounts horizontally is an uncommon scenario, flicking is what people often do when having to scroll ridiculously long lists vertically. So the thumb or finger comes off the screen before the edge. Vivaldi Android users will just have to be educated about this requirement for the History & scrolling gestures. Easily done with the feature announcement & on the help pages.

So I think that this not only expands the gestures feature in a natural way, maintaining the paradigm already created by Vivaldi Android, but does so while implementing some popular feature requests. The design avoids colliding with the gestures in the operating system, uses intuitive movements or visual cues for the associated actions, is easily discovered, and doesn't overload the interface or user with too many similar gestures. It is possible that in the future more gestures could be added, using diagonal swipes or right angle turns for L shaped swipes. For the time being however, I think it is best to start with this set of core functions - it covers high frequency user actions without making any individual gesture more complex than a straight swipe from points A to B. The gestures feature is kept simple, but fairly complete with the addition of these 5 new gestures & invoked actions.

I hope Vivaldi finds this idea useful, and the community can help determine what to do about the Speed Dial & Close Tab gestures. It's not ideal to change an already assigned gesture, but we're still in beta so it's not as bad as a user base trained for years having their muscle memory broken. If it makes more sense to move the Speed Dial gesture and replace it with Close Tab, there will be minimal pain to the existing user base.

Thanks for reading,
BoneTone

sirien.neiris

I have to say I do not like the idea of hard defined gestures nor I like the idea of (general, user adjustable) gestures which are tight to (1) some specific place on the screen (ie bottom left corner) or (2) to some specific place in the app (ie URL bar). The first feels like something which should be left to system (Android) UI and the second as something which should be tight to some specific function (like showing speed dial, as you suggested).

On desktop you can perform the gesture anywhere on the screen you want (that is kinda important part of the feature) and I do not see why it can't work the same on Mobile. You could even have the same gestures with the ~same UI - in fact that could be even synced.

Of course single finger gestures would have to be more complex than simple one direction drag (only "up" or only "left" etc - in fact "up-down" or "down-up" could be also problematic), but that is not such a problem. With two finger gestures I see no problem whatsoever.

For example I use "down-right" to close the tab and "right-left" to open new tab. I'm very used to this - I've been using it since the old Opera - and I would very much like to use the same in Mobile UI.

EDIT, ADD: ok, two finger gestures are probably not a good idea since they couldn't be performed single-handedly.

BoneTone

@sirien-neiris

Vivaldi already has gestures tied to specific locations on the top toolbar. That's why 3 of the new gestures are tied to a specific location on the bottom toolbar, it is keeping with the paradigm already defined by Vivaldi.

I included the other 2 (History Back & Forward) because if the requests for them that I've read. Having them work the same way as the others, pulling in from a specific location, isn't practical due to collisions with the system defined gestures or crowding the space on the toolbars. Any more than 3 and it will become mor difficult to use, requiring extra attention to the precision of where you start on devices that are known for their lack of precision.

So those two can start almost anywhere. They just have to start somewhere in the middle of the screen. How big the margins should be away from the edge would probably be best answered by a usability study - whether that's a formal study done bringing real world users into the lab to conduct, or a less formal study with internal employees trying out several options is something only Vivaldi could address.

But for those two, as long as you're inside the margins, you just swipe all the way to the edge and that should be both easy to do and sufficient to distinguish it from horizontal scrolling.

I do agree that the "open speed dial" action makes the most sense if it starts from the speed dial button in the UI. But I don't know Vivaldi's feelings on changing that action from its current gesture.

LonM

@bonetone This request looks like its related to this one for gestures - is this a different request or are you providing details of how you would like gestures implemented?

sirien.neiris

@bonetone funny, I didn't know about these "gestures" which are already in place. But the thing is that these are (feel more like...) not as much "gestures" in the sense gestures work in desktop as they are (...feel more like...) simple "swipe functionality expansion" of buttons from which you initiate them. You swipe from nav-URL, you get speed dial. You swipe from V button, it's like pressing it. Swiping from tabs button could open a new tab and so on and that would be probably even kind-of intuitive (once you actually learn that such "gestures" exist...), but I'm not sure how much is it a "gesture" in the same sense as "gestures" on desktop - nor I'm much sure how much useful would be to have there anything more complex than a simple swipe (like "down-left from V button"...)

Basically, all I'm trying to say is, that as a user I feel quite a difference between "swipe-command", which to me is just an alternative to "tap-command", and "gesture". Having gestures in Mobile would be great, though.