Chromebook Tip Tuesday: The best Chromebook trackpad gesture most people don’t know about [VIDEO]

One of my absolute favorite parts of using Chrome OS over the years has undoubtedly been the trackpad gestures. In a time when Windows didn’t really support any sort of gestures on its terrible selection of available trackpads, Chromebooks entered the scene with input methods that were much closer in use to the Macbook. At that point in time, that meant multi-finger gestures worked and two-finger scrolls were a normal part of the user experience.

Honestly, that navigation is one of the parts of the overall experience that initially made me love using a Chromebook. Windows quickly got better in the following years, but Chrome OS has continued being a close second in many way to Macbooks when it comes to trackpad navigation and it just keeps getting better. The experience is elevated with better hardware like Gorilla Glass, sure, but even cheap plastic trackpads are miles better than what you get on affordable Windows machines. And I’d put the trackpads on the Pixelbook and Pixelbook Go up against anything out there.

For today’s tip, we want to highlight what is in my opinion the most useful of all Chromebook trackpad gestures: the tab scrub. With this simple gesture, you can move quickly and easily between all your open tabs without the need to move your mouse cursor a single pixel on your screen. It comes in handy when you are bouncing back and forth between multiple tabs and doing repetitive functions. It also comes in handy when you need to do things like move between open Gmail tabs and accounts as well.

Even better, there’s no need to turn anything on to get it working. You simply need to place 3 fingers on the trackpad surface, slide left or right, and watch the highlighted tab scrub through all your open tabs. Go ahead, try it out. Open a few tabs and move between them. If you’ve never used this shortcut, your usage may now be forever altered and you will quickly become spoiled by Chrome OS. No other OS has this feature and I’m not sure any other ever will. Once you get used to having it, it makes the absence of it incredibly hard to live without.

We hope this tip helps you be more productive with your Chromebook and that it makes your overall usage a bit more fun, too. Keep an eye out for next Tuesday’s tip and make sure you are subscribed to the newsletter so you don’t miss a thing!