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Chrome OS adds ‘Material Design visual indicators’ for browser navigation gestures

Chrome OS has slowly been undergoing a redesign with Google’s Material Design for a while now, and today, well-known Chrome developer, François Beaufort, is revealing another new change.

Currently live in the canary channel, new visual indicators are coming to Chrome OS which shows when users are using gestures to navigate back and forth between pages. These new indicators have a wonderful little Material Design look and animation as well.

To enable this feature, you’ll first need to be on the Canary channel, or wait until Google brings it to more stable channels. Once there, you’ll need to enable the flag chrome://flags/#overscroll-history-navigation. 

In its current form, this functionality uses the trackpad (on Chrome OS or on other platforms with Chrome) to “swipe back” to a previous page, or the other direction to move forward if you’ve gone back. It’s a handy gesture, and these new indicators are a welcome improvement to it.

You can check out the functionality in action on Beaufort’s Google+ post, or in the GIF below courtesy of ChromeUnboxed.


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