Nathan Hinkle

Enable Synaptics Multitouch Gestures in Google Chrome

To download the files necessary to enable multitouch gestures in Google Chrome on your Synaptics touchpad, head straight to the downloads page.

Synaptics is one of the primary manufacturers of touch pads for laptops, and in recent years, Synaptics has included multitouch gestures with their touch pads. One of the handy gestures, which oddly is not always enabled by default, is the three-finger swipe. By swiping three fingers left or right across the touchpad, you can go forward or backward in a browser, photo viewer, PDF reader, PowerPoint presentation, and other applications. The gesture works fine in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but doesn't do anything in Google Chrome. After some quick googling, I found the solution to enabling the forward and backward gestures for Google Chrome. Surprisingly, it's not Chrome's fault, but Synaptics': all you need to do is add a couple registry keys.

All you need to do is export all of the keys for Mozilla Firefox in the Synaptics key at HKLM\Software\Synaptics, replace all instances of "Mozilla Firefox" with "Google Chrome", change "firefox.exe" to "chrome.exe", and reimport the keys. If you're not experienced with editing the registry or that sounds daunting, or if you're just lazy, you can download the handy Synaptics Multitouch Gestures for Chrome registry file which I have created and just import that, or you can download the batch file I created which adds the registry values needed and then automatically restarts the touchpad drivers. In some cases, you may need to restart the computer for changes to take effect.

If you're unsure whether your touchpad is a Synaptics or not, look in your taskbar notification area (the icons near the clock by the lower right-hand side of the screen) for an icon that looks like this: favicon.ico. Double-click on it to change your touchpad settings and to enable multitouch gestures such as 3-finger swipe.

Thanks again to the Google Groups user whose post helped me figure this out!

Comments

  • You can swap them around :)

    Just edit:


    [ H K E Y _ L O C A L _ M A C H I N E \ S O F T W A R E \ S y n a p t i c s \ S y n T P E n h \ P l u g I n C o n f i g \ T o u c h P a d \ A p p P r o f i l e s \ G o o g l e C h r o m e \ 2 F i n g e r G e s t u r e s ]

    " C o n f i g I D 7 K e y M a c r o V 0 0 1 " = " C o n f i g I D 3 K e y M a c r o B i n "


    " C o n f i g I D 3 K e y M a c r o V 0 0 1 " = " C o n f i g I D 7 K e y M a c r o B i n "

    Posted by Ben, 15/04/2012 10:02am (1 month ago)

  • Thank you for your help. With your two downloads I can now three finger swipe in my favorite browser.

    Posted by Jacob, 09/03/2012 12:39pm (2 months ago)

  • Brendan: thanks for the comments! I'm unaware of any way to reverse direction, but I'm sure if you played around with the registry settings long enough you could find a way to do it. I dislike Lion's reverse scrolling, so I'm not going to find the time to do it myself, but if you do figure it out let me know!

    Posted by Nathan Hinkle, 05/01/2012 11:17am (5 months ago)

  • Thanks Nathan, I tried another registry hack and it didnt work but yours did!

    Now, I wonder if its possible to reverse the actions so they are the same as OSX Lion, i.e swipe right to go to previous page. Has anyone managed that?

    Posted by brendan, 02/01/2012 1:30pm (5 months ago)

  • thanks buddy, if you can add batch file for windows explorer as well then it will be very kind of you.

    Posted by amit, 29/10/2011 5:40am (7 months ago)

  • I have discovered that if you replace all instances of "Google Chrome" with "Windows Explorer" and "chrome.exe" with "explorer.exe" in the registry files then you can get three finger flick to work in Windows Explorer too.

    Feel free to make a batch file to make it easy for people to make this change.

    Posted by Edward Paton-Williams, 25/07/2011 9:43pm (10 months ago)

  • As far as I can tell this doesn't work for version 15.2.20, when used it makes syntphenh come up with a message repeatdly and won't allow any of the custom features such as two finger scrolling or three finger flick, if anyone has a fix it would be much appreciated.

    Posted by joebob, 19/07/2011 1:09am (10 months ago)

  • Also had to restart, but it worked like a charm. Thanks!

    Posted by Polshgiant, 07/06/2011 6:17pm (12 months ago)

  • Thanks for the feedback. I have added information indicating that a restart is required in some situations. Bill, I'm not sure if that would be possible or not. I'll try to look into it at some point, but as far as I know right now, it's not possible. I would be interested in any information anyone can offer with regards to this though.

    Posted by Nathan Hinkle, 11/05/2011 10:45pm (1 year ago)

  • is there any way we could customize the gestures, like swipe left for previous tab, swipe right for next tab, swipe down for close tab?

    Posted by bill, 11/05/2011 6:25pm (1 year ago)

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