Touchpad swipe gestures for back and forward navigation

[cweiske]

It would be nice if I could do a two-finger swipe to the left on my laptop's touchpad to navigate back in history, as well as swiping to the right to go forward in history.

Version 0.7.2 on Debian 13 does not support that.

[trollixx]

Interesting, I was under impression that gestures work out of the box with Qt WebEngine. I think I only tested on Windows. Need to dig what needs to be done.

[trollixx]

Did some digging. This doesn't work out of the box on any platform, and my earlier impression was wrong:

• In Chromium, swipe-to-navigate is implemented by the overscroll controller, which lives in the Aura view layer. Qt WebEngine has its own view layer and stubs that hook out entirely (SetOverscrollControllerEnabled in web_contents_view_qt.h), so Chromium's OverscrollHistoryNavigation / TouchpadOverscrollHistoryNavigation features have nothing to act on, even via QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS.
• On Linux, two-finger touchpad swipes reach the application as plain horizontal wheel events, so there is no gesture event to handle either.
• There is no QTBUG requesting this for Qt WebEngine; the closest is QTBUG-43650. Other Qt WebEngine browsers have the same gap (e.g. qutebrowser#4569, open since 2019).