Microsoft makes it easier to enable mouse gestures in Edge

Microsoft Edge will soon get mouse gesture support, allowing you to perform various actions within the browser much faster. Although the feature is already available for testing in preview versions of Microsoft Edge, enabling it requires modifying a shortcut with a special command.

Such a method is not-so-user-friendly and only works when you launch the browser using the modified shortcut. Luckily, after a few weeks of testing, Microsoft is ready to give insiders a notably better alternative.

As spotted by @Leopeva64 on Twitter (which seems to be not having a good time under the jenius rule of Elon Musk), one of the most recent Edge Canary updates introduced a dedicated flag for enabling mouse gestures. This makes the feature easier to enable and use without relying on a specific shortcut. Here is how to enable mouse gestures in Microsoft Edge Canary.

Enable mouse gestures in Microsoft Edge.

1. Update Microsoft Edge Canary to the latest version: head to edge://settings/help and wait for the browser to download and install available updates.
2. Go to edge://flags and type "Edge Mouse Gesture" into the search box. Alternatively, use the edge://flags/#edge-mouse-gesture link.
3. Change the flag's status from Default to Enabled and restart Microsoft Edge Canary.
4. Now you can use and customize mouse gestures. Go to Settings > Appearance > Mouse Gesture and toggle on the Enable Mouse Gesture option.
5. You can use and personalize 16 different gestures. Although the browser will not let you set custom keyboard shortcuts, available options include plenty of actions to make the feature fit your needs. To customize mouse gestures in Edge, go to Settings > Appearance > Configure Mouse Gesture​​​​​​.

Currently, mouse gestures are only available in the Canary Channel, which often suffers from instabilities and bugs. Therefore, we do not recommend using it as your primary browser. You can run it side-by-side with the stable release or wait for Microsoft to ship the flag to Dev or Beta. Hopefully, it will not take too long.