Is it possible to have gestures with trackpads?

Question

On a Macbook Pro in Chrome, sliding two fingers across the screen allows you to move backwards and forwards. How do I go about disabling this, and creating custom gestures in jQuery or Javascript?

All I really need to know is how do you detect when two fingers are on the trackpad, which I assume is the best way to do this. You can do it on mobile with e.touches!

Answer 1

Update May 2017

• Chrome has implemented the new wheel-event. Pinch-Zoom can be detected as a wheel-event with ctrlKey === true.
• Firefox is going to ship the same behaviour in Fx55.
• Edge supports the wheel-event unless you are using a "precision-touchpad". No Idea what about pinch-zoom.
• opera probably matches chrome-behaviour (not tested)
• safari has basic wheel-events and supports the proprietary (yet kinda great) gestureEvents

Original Answer

As of April 2016, the pinch-zoom gesture is supported in (very) different ways in different browsers:

• Chrome sends mousewheel-events with ev.ctrlKey===true
• Mozilla is discussing matching chrome-behaviour: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1052253
• In modern Safari (>9.1) gesture-events can be used: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/releasenotes/General/WhatsNewInSafari/Articles/Safari_9_1.html and https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkitjs/gestureevent
• Edge is unlikely to handle it at all.

Answer 2

Touchpads do not trigger touch-related events (but usually control the mouse pointer instead. This cannot be affected by a website for obvious reasons) so that's not possible.

If gestures done on a touchpad have non-standard behaviour this is usually done by the touchpad's driver/software.