Glidepad Touchpad Gestures — etcetera

Touchpad gestures for Firefox: two-finger swipes to your own sites and between tabs, back and forward, pinches and flicks. Made for the touchpad (trackpad) every laptop already has. Not mouse gestures.

Features

• 👆 Double swipe, your choice of action. Swipe twice with two fingers, left or right, and each side does what you picked: opens your site (the inbox, the tracker, whatever you open forty times a day), goes to the tab on the left or on the right, jumps back to the previous tab or reopens a closed one.
• ⚓ Anchor a tab. Press the anchor beside a direction and the current tab's address goes into the field.
• ↩ Return to the open tab. While that tab stays open, the swipe returns to it instead of opening a copy.
• ↔ Back and Forward. One swipe still goes Back or Forward, exactly as it always has.
• 🔄 Flick to reload, open or close a tab. At the very top of a page, two sharp flicks reload it, the same movement your thumbs make to refresh on a phone. Mid-page it is just scrolling.
• 🔗 Spread two fingers over a link. It opens where you chose: in a background tab, the way a middle click does, in a new tab, a new window or a private window.
• 👀 Link preview. The link opens in a small window over the page, right next to the pointer. Take a look and close it: pinch twice, press Esc or click outside the window. The page underneath stays where it was. The private preview keeps the page out of your history.
• 🤏 Two quick pinches. Close the tab, go back to the previous one, reopen a closed tab or open your site.
• 🎯 Calibration. Five seconds, two swipes on your own touchpad. The recognition thresholds are read off them instead of being guessed. A longer three-step calibration is in the settings.
• ⚙ Everything is adjustable: how far a swipe travels, how sharp the second one must be, how long to wait for it.

Free and Pro

Free covers one half of each pair: one swipe direction with your site, Back and Forward, spreading a link into a background tab, and the flick at the top. Pro adds the other half: the second swipe direction, two quick pinches, returning to the open tab, and the other actions (previous tab, tab on the left or right, reopened tab, new window, private window, preview). Every Pro feature is on for your first three weeks; after that Free keeps working, with no nag screens. Pro is a subscription sold at glidepad.app.

Good to know

• While Glidepad is on, Firefox's own swipe navigation is switched off, so the two don't race each other. One checkbox in the popup brings it back.
• Windows with a precision touchpad: tested. macOS and Linux: beta. Gestures may be unstable there, and they are not guaranteed to work.
• Private windows: gestures work there, and links open in them, once you allow Glidepad to run in private windows (Add-ons → Glidepad → Details).
• "Reopen closed tab" needs access to recently closed tabs; Glidepad shows where to allow it when you pick that action.

Privacy

Glidepad looks only at the two numbers in each wheel event, and at the address of a link you spread two fingers over. No page content and no browsing history leave your computer.

What goes to glidepad.app: one request on install that starts the free weeks of Pro, with no data in it; if you activate a Pro key, the key itself, to check it on activation and about once a day (Firefox asks you first); and a daily install count with a random id, the version, the plan, OS, browser, language and which action each gesture has. Never addresses or page content. Firefox lists the install count as optional "technical and interaction data" when you install Glidepad; switch it off there or later in Add-ons → Glidepad → Permissions and data.

Firefox will ask to "access your data for all websites": that is what a gesture on any page needs, not what Glidepad does with it.