FullTouch - Fullscreen Touch Controls

A Chrome extension for touchscreen 2-in-1 laptops. In browser fullscreen (F11), Chrome hides the tab strip and address bar, and there's no touch gesture to bring them back or to leave fullscreen - the top-edge reveal only works with a mouse. FullTouch fixes that, and adds a two-finger swipe for switching tabs.

Gestures

Swipe down from the top edge in fullscreen to reveal a slim nav bar with:

• ‹ / › - back / forward
• ⟳ - reload (optional)
• + - open a new tab
• address box - type a URL or a search query
• ⌃ - hide the bar (stay in fullscreen)
• ✕ - exit fullscreen entirely

Below the bar, a tab strip shows all your open tabs - tap any one to jump straight to it. It's on by default; turn it off in Settings. (It reads open-tab titles and icons on your device only - nothing is stored or sent.)

Swipe up on the bar or press Esc to dismiss it without leaving fullscreen.

Swipe two fingers sideways to switch tabs (touchscreen) - swipe right for the previous (left) tab, swipe left for the next, wrapping around at the ends. It works in or out of fullscreen; single-finger swipe-to-go-back is left untouched. Turn it off or reverse the direction in Settings.

Prefer a visible target to a blind swipe? Enable the optional pull tab in Settings - a small handle at the top edge you can tap or drag down to open the bar.

How it works

Chrome's browser fullscreen (F11) is owned by the browser, not the page - a web page can't leave it and document.exitFullscreen() has no effect on it. So FullTouch splits the work:

• A content script detects the gestures and renders the nav bar inside a Shadow DOM overlay (isolated from page CSS), staying in fullscreen.
• The service worker is the only context with chrome.windows / chrome.tabs access, so it handles the privileged actions: ✕ asks it to call chrome.windows.update({ state: "maximized" }) (which actually drops the window out of fullscreen, matching Chrome's native F11 exit), and the two-finger swipe asks it to activate the next/previous tab.
• Keyboard fallbacks (chrome.commands) cover pages where content scripts can't run (chrome://, the Web Store, the new-tab page).

Install (unpacked, for development)

1. Run python scripts/gen_icons.py if icons/ is missing.
2. Open chrome://extensions, enable Developer mode.
3. Click Load unpacked and select this folder.
4. Open a page, press F11, then swipe down from the top edge.

Default shortcuts (editable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts): Alt+N toggles the bar, Alt+Shift+F exits fullscreen.

Settings

Click the toolbar icon to open the options page (or right-click it → Options). Configure the top-edge zone and reveal distance, two-finger tab switching and its direction, the optional pull tab, the tab strip, the search engine, and whether the reload button shows.

Privacy

FullTouch collects no data. None. Ever. It has no servers, no analytics, and contains no networking code of any kind - there is nothing in it that could send your data anywhere. It never stores or transmits the pages you visit. Your settings are saved only on your own device (chrome.storage.local) and are not synced anywhere.

About the scary install warning. Chrome will say FullTouch can “read and change all your data on all sites.” That warning is mandatory for any extension allowed to run on every website - and FullTouch's gestures have to work everywhere you browse, so it has to request <all_urls>. But “allowed to run on every site” is not “collects your data”: the extension only watches for touch gestures and draws its own nav bar on top of the page. It's open-source, so you can verify every line yourself.

See PRIVACY.md for the full policy.

License

MIT - see LICENSE.

Thanks 🦴

FullTouch is free and open-source. Huge thanks to everyone who chips in via the support button to keep the project going - and our Chief Canine Officer, Cookie Nibblestien, in ample biscuit supplies!