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Chrome dev build includes experimental mouse swipe feature

Swipe through webpages in the latest Chrome version

A new feature in the latest Google Chrome development build lets you use your mouse as you would use your finger on a touchscreen interface to “swipe” horizontally through a series of web pages. The New Tab page, which can be set to open by default whenever you open a new browsing tab, normally includes several rows in which your Chrome Apps, your most used pages and your recently closed tabs are displayed.

Chrome swipe

You can drag the page horizontally to move from one section to another

The experimental New Tab page, available in Chrome’s “dev” build (12.0.742.21) separates these sections into separate pages. You can use tabs at the bottom of the page to access them, however we discovered by accident that you can also click and hold your mouse, and then swipe side-to-side, to “drag” the page horizontally to access the different sections. The feature is so experimental that two of the pages hold dummy data – “foo” and “bar”.

Chrome dev options

The “about:flags” page lists all the experimental features you can try out in Chrome’s dev build

To try this feature, you’ll first have to download Chrome’s dev build by going to the Chromium Project’s page at http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel. In the section “Subscribing to a channel”, click on the link marked “Dev channel for Windows” and download the software. Once you have your new version of Chrome installed, open a browser window and type “about:flags” in the address bar. This will list all of the experimental features available to you. Scroll down until you see “Experimental new tab page” and click on “Enable”.

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