Expose cancellable event or API to disable browser swipe navigation (horizontal/vertical gestures)

[cullsin]

What is the issue with the HTML Standard?

🚫 Feature Request: Expose Cancellable Event or API to Disable Browser Swipe Navigation Gestures

📌 Summary

Modern browsers implement native swipe gestures (horizontal and vertical) for navigation (e.g., back/forward, overscroll). However, these gestures are not exposed to web applications and cannot be intercepted using event.preventDefault().

This creates a limitation for advanced web applications that rely on custom gesture handling.

---

❗ Problem Statement

Currently:

• Browser-level swipe gestures (trackpad/mobile) trigger navigation
• No DOM event is fired for these gestures
• event.preventDefault() cannot stop navigation
• CSS like overscroll-behavior is insufficient or inconsistent

As a result, developers cannot:

• Detect swipe navigation gestures
• Override default browser behavior
• Implement custom gesture-driven UX reliably

---

🎯 Expected Behavior

Web applications should be able to:

1. Detect swipe navigation gestures
2. Prevent default navigation when required
3. Implement custom gesture handling

---

🔍 Current Behavior

• Horizontal swipe → triggers back/forward navigation
• Vertical overscroll → triggers browser-level actions
• No standard event is emitted
• No reliable opt-out mechanism exists

---

💥 Impact

This limitation affects:

• Full-screen web apps (e.g., editors, dashboards)
• PWAs and mobile-first applications
• Canvas/WebGL-based apps
• Gesture-heavy UI/UX systems

Issues observed:

• Unexpected navigation → loss of application state
• Conflicts with custom gesture libraries
• Inability to achieve native-like UX

---

🔁 Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a web app with custom gesture handling
2. Add touch/pointer event listeners with preventDefault()
3. Perform horizontal swipe (trackpad or mobile)
4. Observe browser navigates back/forward instead of respecting app logic

---

🧪 Workarounds Attempted

• overscroll-behavior: none
• Touch and pointer event interception
• Passive event overrides

❌ None reliably prevent browser navigation gestures across environments

---

💡 Proposed Solutions

Option 1: New Cancellable Event

window.addEventListener("browserswipe", (event) => {
  if (event.direction === "left" || event.direction === "right") {
    event.preventDefault(); // Prevent navigation
  }
});

[smaug----]

See w3c/pointerevents#636

[cullsin]

browserswipe event is not available / not dispatched in any browser

Summary

There is no native browserswipe event dispatched on window (or any other
DOM target) in any major browser. Attempting to listen for it silently
registers a handler that never fires.

window.addEventListener("browserswipe", (event) => {
  if (event.direction === "left" || event.direction === "right") {
    // This callback is never invoked in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge
  }
});
Steps we attempted to implement swipe-based navigation guarding
Registered window.addEventListener("browserswipe", handler)
The event listener registered without error but the callback was never invoked on any left/right swipe gesture in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge (desktop and mobile).

Checked event.direction property
Based on available snippets and community references, we expected the event object to carry a direction property ("left" / "right"). Since the event never fired, the property could not be verified.

Searched MDN Web Docs
No documentation exists for a browserswipe event under Window, Document, Element, or any other Web API interface.

Searched the WHATWG HTML Living Standard
No mention of browserswipe exists in the spec.

Searched existing browser vendor documentation
Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko bug trackers and release notes contain no reference to a browserswipe event.

Found only an unmaintained third-party jQuery plugin
The only result named browserSwipe is [kenwheeler/browserSwipe](https://github.com/kenwheeler/browserSwipe) — a jQuery plugin (105 stars, effectively unmaintained) that intercepts trackpad mousewheel delta and does not dispatch a "browserswipe" event on window.

Attempted event.preventDefault() inside the handler
Even if the event had fired, it is unclear whether preventDefault() would suppress the native swipe-to-navigate gesture, since no spec defines the cancellability of such an event.

Fell back to native touch events
We resorted to touchstart / touchend to compute swipe direction manually, as there is no standardised high-level swipe event available.

Request
Please clarify:

Is there any plan to standardise a high-level swipe/gesture event (e.g. swipe, browserswipe, navigationgesture) on window or Navigation that would allow web applications to intercept or observe left/right swipe-to-navigate gestures?
If so, what is the expected event name, target, and event.direction (or equivalent) shape?
Would such an event be cancellable so that apps can prompt users before navigating away (similar to beforeunload)?
A standardised, cancellable swipe-navigation event would fill a real gap — currently there is no reliable way to distinguish a browser back-gesture from programmatic history.go(-1) at the event level.

Environment tested:

Chrome 124+ (desktop & Android)
Safari 17+ (macOS & iOS)
Firefox 125+ (desktop)
Edge 124+ (desktop)
Related:

[Navigation API](https://github.com/WICG/navigation-api)
[beforeunload event](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/window-object.html#unloading-documents)