Obviously, we prefer Android here at Android Police, but there are a handful of features from iOS that we historically envy, like iMessage, the platform's expanded app selection, and the performance of Apple's SoCs. But more minor feature from Safari that Android converts may have missed and which Chrome for Android lost long ago could be coming back. As spotted by the folks at Chrome Story, gesture-based history navigation may be coming to Chrome (i.e., swipe to go back/forward).

The addition was spotted via a commit on the Chromium Gerrit controlling a new flag entry which is surprisingly explicit about its purpose:

Android: Create a chrome://flags entry for gesture-nav

Creates a new entry in chrome://flags for gesture navigation that will allow horizontal scroll gesture to navigate forward/backward.

There's also an item in the Chromium bug tracker connected to investigating the possibility which was updated with mention of the commit detailing the new flag, and which also contains a mockup video of what the feature could look like:

 

We assume the feature is still being worked on — although a "hacky prototype" was tossed together to test the concept, it presumably wasn't finished. If a flag is being considered, it may not be too long in the grand scheme of things before the feature appears in a Canary or developer build of Chrome for Android. We'll just have to keep an eye out for it.

Source: Chromium Gerrit, Chromium bug tracker

Via: Chrome Story