Browser extension · Chrome & Edge
Not new movements to learn: the same two-finger swipe, flick and pinch you already make. The browser drops them; Glidepad turns them into opening a site, jumping to the next tab, reloading a page and closing one you are done with.
Chrome and Edge on Windows · no account, no sign-in
No page content read, no third-party trackers
Live check
streamThe gestures
Your hand already makes all five. Glidepad only decides what they mean.
Horizontal
Two quick swipes the same way do what you picked for that side. Open the address you assigned — point them at the inbox and the tracker you open forty times a day — or go to the tab on that side, back to the previous tab, or reopen the one you just closed.
Diagonal
A short two-finger flick up and to the right goes to the tab on the right; down and to the left, to the tab on the left. It is free and on from the start, and a single straight swipe does nothing at all.
Vertical
Two sharp flicks that keep pulling a page with nowhere left to go — the same movement as pull-to-refresh on a phone. Mid-page it stays silent: there that movement is ordinary scrolling, and Glidepad only watches ordinary scrolling, it never blocks it. Reload is the default; a new tab or closing one are yours to pick instead.
Pinch
Spread two fingers over a link or a video thumbnail and it opens behind what you are reading, like a middle click — or in a new tab, a new window, incognito, or a preview: a small window by the pointer that two pinches, Esc or a click outside closes. The only gesture that cares what is under the cursor — everywhere else, spreading still zooms.
Pinch
Two quick pinches close the tab — or take you to the previous one, reopen a closed tab or open your site, whichever you pick. Only at normal zoom: while a page is zoomed in, pinching gives the zoom back and the tab is left alone — so coming back from a zoom never costs you the page.
Not mouse gestures
Gesture extensions have existed for twenty years, and they all ask for the same thing: hold the right mouse button, draw an L, let go. That is a different hand and a different habit — and on a laptop, a mouse you do not have.
Glidepad works with the surface under your thumbs. The catch is that browsers
expose no touchpad API at all. Everything a page can see about a five-contact
precision touchpad is a stream of wheel events with two numbers in
them.
Controls
Every number the recognizer runs on is in the options page. Nothing is hidden behind a “sensitivity: medium” slider.
The popup
Click the icon and there is nothing else to find. One row per gesture, named by the movement your fingers make, with what it does right there in the row — a site, a tab, a preview — and a menu of the alternatives one click away. The half of each pair that Pro unlocks is marked, not hidden — you can see what you would be buying before you buy it.
You rarely type an address at all: the anchor inside a field takes it from the tab you are on. While that tab stays open the swipe returns to it; close it and the swipe opens the saved address again.
The numbers are one click deeper, behind More settings: how long to wait for a second flick, how far it has to travel, how sharp it has to be. The flag in the corner switches the interface between sixteen languages.
Swipe takeover
Browser swipe navigation fires on the slightest movement, and some pages start it from their own inner scroller. While Glidepad is on it is off across the whole page, both directions, and a single swipe does nothing, so a page never goes back by accident. One checkbox in the popup hands the browser its swipe back.
Tab reuse
A double swipe can open a fresh tab every time, or jump back to the tab it opened last time. Close that tab and the next swipe opens it again.
Tuning
How sharp a flick has to be in px/ms, how long to wait for a second one, how far a movement has to travel, and how far the velocity must jump to count as a new flick rather than a ripple in the tail.
Stays out of the way
While there is still room to scroll sideways under the pointer, the swipe belongs to the page — wide tables and image strips behave exactly as they did. Pinch-zoom is never touched.
Privacy
There is no account to create, and nothing it sends says what you browse. On install it asks glidepad.app which day your three free weeks of Pro began, so a reinstall does not start them over. About once a day it reports a random install ID with its version, whether Pro is on, your system and browser, and which action each gesture is set to — never an address — so we can see how many people use Glidepad and what fails them. Pro adds the licence key check, on activation and about once a day after that. All of it goes to glidepad.app and nowhere else.
It does run on every site, and Chrome will tell you so when you install it. That permission exists because gestures happen everywhere, not because anything is being read. The full text is in the privacy policy.
Pricing
Every threshold in the recognizer, and the swipe takeover that keeps the browser out of the gesture, are free and stay free — and so is the double swipe left, with everything it can do. Pro is the second half of each pair.
Pro yearly
$9.99/ year
$0.83 a month, billed once a year
Pro lifetime
$19.99once
one payment, every update, nothing to renew
Pro monthly
$2.99/ month
the same Pro, cancel whenever
The free version stays free, with no time limit, and your first three weeks come with every Pro feature switched on.
Lifetime is paid once and never renews. A subscription can be cancelled any time from the link in your receipt or by writing to support@glidepad.app. Pro keeps working until the paid period ends.
Prices in USD. Whether tax is added on top or already included depends on where you are; the total is shown before you pay. Pricing in full.
Questions
Chrome and Edge, built and tested on Windows with a precision touchpad. A Firefox build exists and ships once it has had the same testing.
macOS is not verified yet. Chrome runs there and the same events arrive, but macOS also does its own two-finger navigation, and until that combination has been tested properly it is not a supported platform.
No. Ordinary vertical scrolling Glidepad only watches, so the page scrolls exactly as it did; it holds a movement back only when it heads off diagonally, the way a flick to the next tab starts. Horizontally it steps in only when there is nothing left to scroll sideways under the pointer, which is precisely when the browser would have navigated anyway. And pages that scroll themselves under two fingers — maps, whiteboards, design editors — keep their swipes.
A double swipe starts as a single one, so the two cannot share a movement: every first half would step back a page. While Glidepad is on, a single swipe does nothing and the browser's own swipe Back is off. The checkbox at the top of the popup turns Glidepad's swipes off and gives the browser its swipe back; the keyboard Back, Alt+← or ⌘[ on a Mac, works as always.
No — the opposite. Glidepad is for the machine you already have open on your knees. A mouse wheel sends the same event type but in large, identical steps; the live check at the top of this page will tell you which one it is looking at.
The software is made and supported by Ivan Korost, working alone. The payment runs through a third-party merchant of record — an authorised reseller that becomes the seller on your invoice and handles VAT and sales tax for your country. Its name is on the checkout, on the receipt and on your card statement, and the terms name it too.
Then you get a refund — 14 days, no argument, see the refund policy. Try the live check above first: it runs the same recognizer the extension ships with, so if it counts your swipes, so will Glidepad. If it counts nothing at all, the touchpad test shows which part is not getting through.