With multitasking enabled on iPad OS26, in Safari, how do you swipe back a page now? It now just resizes the window which is a bit annoying after years of just swiping from the left
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Safari “back” gesture
- Thread starter JasonHB
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It’s this kind of thing, and taking away the quick screenshot swipe, and apparently losing Quick Notes, that’s going to make my iPadOS 26 experience seem not so great ☹️
If the app is full screen, swiping from the edge still works. If you have a Magic Keyboard, you can use cmd [ and cmd ] to go back and forward by a page. When neither of those are available, I have to resort to the back arrow at the top of the page.
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I think the idea is that windowed is used with a trackpad and keyboard, so the trackpad gesture should work.
Not reliably. Mostly you move the window or its site by trying the back-gesture. Also lots of funky stuff going on when you change the direction of the pad. Maybe you're right and they think this is for the MK only, but then we'd need some kind of system toggle to change the window/single-app-mode when attaching or detaching the keyboard (which maybe could be done via shortcuts)
>That setting exists now in multitasking & gestures and can be accessed via control center
In PB? Can't find it, at least not in the sense of what I meant: an Automation that activates Window-Mode when the MagicKeyboard is attached and switches it off as soon as it is detached. Can't find that as a setting and also not as an option in Shortcuts/Automation (like you can trigger a shortcut by attaching a display).
In PB? Can't find it, at least not in the sense of what I meant: an Automation that activates Window-Mode when the MagicKeyboard is attached and switches it off as soon as it is detached. Can't find that as a setting and also not as an option in Shortcuts/Automation (like you can trigger a shortcut by attaching a display).
Currently there appears no way to switch between Windowed / Full Screen using shortcuts. But that’s a cool idea to switch it when a keyboard is connected—perhaps something shortcuts can do in the future. But as pointed out earlier, you can easily toggle between the two window modes using control center by selecting the button with the three rectangles. Regardless of which mode you are in, when the MK is attached the backward/forward gesture does work in Safari. Swipe the track pad right/left with two fingers.
I hated that gesture on Mac and IPad ,especially that logs me out when I accidentally go back on sites that don’t let you use back button. I guess it’s painful for those who use it. May be Apple can give a toggle of some sort.
System wide, the swipe back gesture no longer requires the start of the gesture to be the leading edge. In other words, you can swipe back from the middle of a page; As long as there is no content where you swipe intercepting the gesture. So if you are zoomed all the way out on a page and it has a background layer, you can just swipe on said background layer
With beta 4, they removed that for Safari it seems. Unless there’s now a toggle somewhere and it’s defaulted to off for me after installing B4.
Oh; Hm - Weird. My iPad has been refusing to go to B4 for a while so I was talking based on B2 and B3 experience - didn't realise it'd changed
Yeah, it’s quite annoying as I’d gotten quite used to it. Still works elsewhere such as in Settings.
I haven’t installed iPadOS 26, and probably you have tried this already, but my instinctive way to do this would be to first select the safari window (is there such a thing as selecting a window in iPadOS 26?), then swipe from the edge of the screen, as opposed to swiping from the edge of the window.