Macbook Air + Safari: Take Advantage of the Track Pad

By Dan Hinckley

5 responses. »

The new track pad on the Macbook air adds many of the touch gestures that many of you have become accustom to on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

In addition to adding these features, the track pad is larger than those you’ll find on the Macbook or Macbook Pro.

While many of the examples that apple displays in their videos focus on how to use the new gestures with photos or some files, the gestures are great with Safari.

Increase Font Size in Safari

To increase the size of the font on any web page that you’re looking at simply place your two fingers on the trackpad in a pinch position and separate your fingers across the track pad. Repeat this if you want the text to be even larger.

Do the opposite of this (Pinch your fingers in) on the track pad to reduce the size of the text on any website.

Navigate Forward and Backwards

The gesture that I find myself using most often is the swiping my fingers left or right to advance back and forth on the pages that I’ve visited in Safari.

Swipe three fingers to the left to move back a page and with three fingers to your right to move forward.

NOTE: All of these gestures currently only work on the track pad on the Macbook Air

About Dan Hinckley
Dan Hinckley is an experienced Mac user who converted to Apple products when they introduced them on Intel Processors. He loves helping others get more out of their devices! Subscribe to Maciverse.com to get the latest from Dan and the Maciverse Team!! Find out more about Dan:

5 Responses so far.

  1. Duane Moore

    November 19, 2008 at 1:52 am

    Is there a way to turn this feature off? I find myself inadvertently increasing the font size all the time in Safari now (since I use two fingers to scroll) and find the new behavior quite annoying.

  2. Greg

    January 26, 2009 at 2:17 pm

    Anyone know how to turn this off?.. I'm thinking about not using Safari anymore because the fonts keep resizing when I'm trying to browse — its *really* annoying..

    - Greg

  3. Aaron

    February 19, 2010 at 8:50 am

    If you want to turn this off just go into system prefs, trackpad, and turn 2 finger pinch off. Easy peasy

  4. Leeann Roxx

    November 5, 2010 at 1:55 pm

    Not true, I'm able to do all these on my MacBook Pro!

  5. KCC

    February 23, 2011 at 1:42 pm

    I've been wondering why all of a sudden my text got smaller… Thanks :)

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