There are lots of 2-in-1 Chromebooks on the market that let you quickly switch between laptop and tablet form factors, and today Google announced that it's rolling out improved gestures for use in tablet mode.
When you're browsing in an app and are ready to return to your home screen, you can do so just by swiping up from the bottom of your screen. You can also quickly see all of your windows and apps that are currently open by swiping up from the bottom of the display and holding at the end of the swipe motion.
Another new gesture will let you see your dock of pinned apps without having to return to the home screen. You can summon this Quick Shelf by making a small swipe up from the bottom of your screen.
There's also a new gesture for browsing the web that'll let you quickly go back a page just by swiping from the left side of the screen.
Another new browser feature that's coming to Chrome in tablet mode will let you easily open a new tab with a big button. You'll be able to reorder tabs by dragging and close tabs by swiping up, too.
Google says that those Chrome-specific features will be available first on the Lenovo Chromebook Duet (shown at the top of this post), which is launching in the next couple of months. The tab strip will be rolled out to other devices soon.
These gestures sound like solid additions to Chrome OS. Not only should they make navigating in tablet mode better, but we've also seen similar gestures roll out on the iPad and on Android devices, and so these Chrome OS gestures should be familiar to folks who have used those other products before.
