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Reason #3: Mouse Gestures

Mouse Gestures are pretty much the best thing since the back button. There is a full list of the mouse gestures supported in Opera at the Opera web site. Right-click and drag left has become so natural to me that when I am forced to use IE to test a site, I am constantly very frustrated at having to move the mouse all the way up to the back button just to go back a page. Sure most of the modern input devices have forward and back buttons for browsing now, but not all of them, and as long as your mouse has at least two buttons, the feature will work in Opera.

I would really like to see a small program that would allow this functionality to be in place system-wide. When browsing through files on my hard drive I still instinctively right click and drag left to go back a page in the directory structure. This could be used in the windows explorer quite easily, as well as in other applications to do things like undo, or cycle through open document windows.

And quickly going back is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also go foward, open new windows, load a duplicate copy of the page in a new tab, scroll through open tabs, etc.

My other most used mouse gesture is right-clicking on a link and dragging down, which opens the link in a new tab. This way I can always insure that the following page will be opened in a new tab instead of taking the place of the current page I’m looking at. This can be accomplished in other browser’s by holding shift and clicking, but who wants to use two hands just to do something so simple?

Note: The excellent Firebird browser also supports mouse gestures (and many other features) via an extension.

There is a plugin for IE that enables mouse gestures as well. http://www.codeproject.com/atl/MouseGestures.asp