Lots of mobile apps feature a “pull-to-refresh” gesture which is fantastic for mobile browsing. Chrome for Android and iOS added it last year, but the desktop was left out. That, of course, made sense, but in the past year, we’ve seen a lot more laptops that double as tablets. Now, Google appears to be bringing this gesture to the desktop version of Chrome.
A recent Chromium commit spotted by the team at ChromeUnboxed uncovers the upcoming addition of a flag which enables the pull-to-refresh gesture. What does that mean? While it’s not heading to the stable version right away, Google is actively working on adding this feature to Chrome, at least in the developer versions. The commit was just posted today, so that means it will be a little while before it actually surfaces in a live build.
The reason for adding this should be clear. The rise of 2-in-1 form factors throughout, not only Chrome OS, but the Windows ecosystem has been absolutely massive. Very few laptops now, running Chrome OS or Windows 10, ship without touchscreens or a 360-degree hinge. Of every Chrome OS device release this year, only one doesn’t support that (because it’s a Chromebox).
Obviously, adding this feature will provide no benefit for users on the desktop or on Apple machines, so it’s likely that it will remain optional until Google can develop a way to activate it by default only on certain devices.
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