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(Repost again to fix mobile tag…) Currently, to activate most gestures, you have to click the mouse/trackpad while over the gesture spot (e.g. on the location bar) and drag, as if you’re using your finger.

When the mouse is over a gesture location, being able to simply use two fingers to initiate the gesture would be nice. This would (IMO) fit expected gesture behavior for iOS. Took me a while to figure out that had to use the “click+drag” gesture to get them working.

Note that this functionality is already in place for page back/page forward. A two finger swipe left or right on the trackpad takes me to the previous/next page. So it’s a bit jarring to have two different physical motions you have to make for different gestures.

  • Vlad replied to this.

    nan3943 Not sure how is mouse/trackpad relevant for mobile version of Orion - can you clarify?

        a month later

        Vlad Specifically the iPad with magic keyboard, which is a pretty popular combo and personally what I use these days. It’s certainly a supported and growing workflow on iPad. Safari on iPadOS even has it requesting the desktop site as the default for a while now (Orion too), and there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts built in. Orion also has a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

        I admit that it’s a pretty niche quality of life adjustment only for iPad/Magic Keyboard users, but I think there are still a lot of us out there who would like to be able to more naturally use the gestures with the Magic Keyboard 🙂 As opposed to having to click then drag.

        • Vlad replied to this.

            Vlad Sure. Here’s an example of a user set gesture “swipe down on location bar to show tabs”, used with the iPad+magic keyboard.

            Current functionality:

            • Position cursor over the location bar, physically click the trackpad and then drag down with one finger while it’s held -> gesture triggers

            I am suggesting:

            • Position cursor over the location bar, swipe down with two fingers -> gesture triggers

            The current system of clicking and dragging to activate gestures with the magic keyboard isn’t ergonomic because other gestures in iPadOS (and even Orion for Page-Next/Page-Back) use multiple finger swipes on the magic keyboard to trigger a gesture. Not click+drag.

                a year later

                Just wanted to ping this since I think it should be relatively low-effort. (think..), and makes gestures way more useful on iipad imo.

                Essentially just recognizing two finger keyboard trackpad swipes as a gesture.

                  3 months later

                  This combined with X-callback support of some form(or better, shortcuts), and a "go to URL" gesture option, would make browsing ergonomics pass safari on iPad imo. Clicking and dragging with a trackpad sucks. Also having to use Apple's weird share menu to do anything with other apps also sucks.

                  It'd be nice to smply move trackpad over toolbar, two finger swipe down, and send the webpage to a shortcut that automatically does X shortcut with that data...(in this case, converts to a PDF and saves to my e-reader)

                    We'd love to see more upvotes befre commiting to this.

                      Vlad Okay this is niche but I think functionally browsers mostly are the same and features like gestures are how Orion can/does stand out. So I'll try to convince you here , especially since I think it should be pretty easy wiin to implement based on my read of the relevant dev docs and Orion already does this anyways as I'll show. I'll save further discussion on anything besides pure initiation of a gesture for an appropriate thread.

                      To be clear, I'm talking specifically about trackpad initiated gestures - not finger gestures - on iPad.

                      Orion currently commits the Apple UI "sin" of having two different systems for the basic "pan" gesture on iPadOS+Trackpad

                      Many upvotes are probably something you won't see. This is because Orion implements two competing systems, one of them works as I am suggesting and is probably the most commonly used by far. IMO its more likely people won't discover the second system vs seeing it and complaining. Revert to using figures.

                      1. Position cursor, two finger swipe (Orion uses this for the most popular gesture - forward/backward a page)
                      2. Position cursor, click (even if that means physically clicking the share button etc), now hold and drag (Orion uses this for the other gestures)

                      #2 will probably be attempted, and unless they think to click and drag like me for some reason, the user will assume they need to initiate it via finger. and not notice that it does work, just weirdly.

                      For a quick test I encourage you to get your nearest trackpad setup and try clicking the location bar and dragging down to see how un-ergonomic it is. Then trigger the working ones (two fingers left/right) to navigate fwd/back pages and see how natural it feels.

                      • Using touch I scroll with one finger, do pan/drag gestures with one finger.. (Orion/general)
                      • Using trackpad I scroll with two fingers and expect to do pan/drag gestures with two fingers.

                      P.S. If the MacOS Orion has trackpad gestures, this applies there then too I suppose.

                      • Vlad replied to this.

                          nan3943 I appreciate the effort. I think the number of users who have iPad plus trackpad is relatively low. This is probably why this has no upvotes. We have to balance our scarce resources over 2,000 open issues and most others impact/benefit the entire user base. Thanks for understanding.

                              9 months later

                              Vlad

                              You’re definitely right, in no world should this be a top priority feature. But I think my messaging on this feature was a bit off at the time - it’s not an iPad feature, it’s all users with a trackpad, including all MacBook users. Let me re-cap and save you the review of the thread:

                              • Currently, activating certain gestures (go back/forward) works as expected. Two fingers swipe.
                              • Other gestures are broken and aren’t really gestures. A one finger hard click must be initiated and then you drag. (Be quick, that click might open the share button)
                              • This thread requests all gestures use two finger swipes to initiate. This is consistent with MacOS/iPadOS system-level gestures, gestures already present in Orion for scrolling or forward/back, and most other applications.

                              That’s all, I wrote a quick justification, but I’ll skip it and say: every browser has reader mode, tab groups, AI, whatever. Few, if any browsers, just feeeeel good to use.. I don’t know what that Looks like either. But for inspiration I leave you with a link to a program I’ve recently begun using that I can’t believe wasn’t native to MacOS: https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/

                              -

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