How to Disable the Two-Finger Swipe Back Gesture on Mac

You're scrolling a wide spreadsheet or panning a design canvas, and suddenly the browser lurches back a page and your half-filled form is gone. That's the two-finger swipe-between-pages gesture misreading a horizontal scroll. One menu turns it off — or retrains it to a gesture you'll never hit by accident.

Turn off the gesture

1. Open System Settings → Trackpad.
2. Select the More Gestures tab.
3. Set Swipe between pages to Off.

The change is immediate and the path is identical on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. To undo it, set the menu back to its default, Scroll Left or Right with Two Fingers.

Why sideways scrolls turn into Back

With the default setting, macOS watches every two-finger horizontal movement and has to guess: is this a scroll inside the page, or a swipe between pages? On a page with no horizontal scrolling, any sideways drag becomes navigation. On wide content — spreadsheets, code with long lines, image canvases, Trello-style boards — a scroll that drifts slightly at the end can still be read as a swipe. Safari and Chrome both honor the system setting, which is why the accident follows you between browsers.

The gesture also triggers in Finder (back through folder history), Photos, App Store, and System Settings itself — anywhere with a Back button. And the cost of a misfire is real: browsers restore the previous page from cache, but half-completed forms, unsent replies in web mail, and in-progress uploads often don't survive the round trip. If it just happened, try swiping the other way or pressing Cmd + ] (Forward) immediately — some sites preserve your state, many don't.

The middle option: three fingers

If you like swiping back but hate the accidents, don't turn it off — change it. In the same menu, choose Swipe with Three Fingers. Horizontal two-finger scrolling then never navigates, and going back requires a deliberate three-finger swipe. Two caveats: Swipe with Two or Three Fingers (the third option) doesn't fix anything, since two fingers still trigger it; and if you use three-finger drag from Accessibility settings, the three-finger swipe conflicts with it — pick one.

The Terminal route

The toggle writes a global preference you can script:

# turn off two-finger swipe navigation (log out and back in to apply)
defaults write -g AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool false

# undo: turn it back on
defaults write -g AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool true

Magic Mouse users have a separate but parallel key — on that device the gesture is a one-finger sideways scroll, controlled in System Settings → Mouse → More Gestures:

# turn off swipe navigation for Magic Mouse
defaults write -g AppleEnableMouseSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool false

# undo
defaults write -g AppleEnableMouseSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool true

Chrome only: keep it everywhere else

If the accidents only bite in Chrome — its wide web apps are where most people hit this — you can disable swipe navigation for Chrome alone and leave the system gesture on:

# stop Chrome responding to swipe-back (restart Chrome to apply)
defaults write com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls -bool false

# undo: let Chrome follow the system setting again
defaults delete com.google.Chrome AppleEnableSwipeNavigateWithScrolls

Safari has no equivalent per-app switch; for Safari, use the system menu. Note the order of precedence: if the system gesture is set to Off, the Chrome key is moot — the per-app key only matters when the gesture is enabled globally and you want one browser exempted.

Whichever route you choose, going back stays two keystrokes away: Cmd + [ and Cmd + ] navigate back and forward in Safari, Chrome, and Finder alike, with zero risk of firing mid-scroll. Many people who disable the gesture find they never miss it.