Overview

Google Chrome on macOS implements backward/forward navigation in the browser history using two-finger swipe on the trackpad or Magic Mouse. This is enabled by default and you’re probably already aware of it. Swipe navigation is very useful in general in other applications, but in Chrome I’ve noticed that I would accidentally trigger it very often, especially while scrolling through long text boxes, or when scrolling a bit sideways instead of completely vertical.

Luckily, this is very easy to fix:

$ defaults read com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls
1
$ defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool FALSE
$ defaults read com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls
0

I’m using a trackapd. For the Magic Mouse, the corresponding property to modify is AppleEnableMouseSwipeNavigateWithScrolls.