I can't believe a petition is necessary for such a simple option.

Web browsing is a fundamental part of using smartphones and should be as comfortable as possible. Since the pull-to-refresh gesture is prone to causing unwanted refreshes, we are asking the Google Chrome developers to make it optional in the mobile edition of Chrome.

 

Addition of pull-to-refresh to Chrome

The pull-to-refresh gesture was first introduced to Chrome in 2015, and was optional for the time being. Anyone who didn't like it would just flip a switch. So far, so good.

However, things would change four years later. In 2019, Chrome 75 was released. With that update, the option to turn pull-to-refresh off was revoked without explanation, making pull-to-refresh mandatory. Following this change, more than two thousand people have expressed the wish for the simple option to turn it off, given that it causes accidental refreshes.

Pull-to-refresh does more harm than good.

The problem with pull-to-refresh is that it is triggered by the exact same finger movement that is responsible for scrolling up, so the user might swipe down meaning to scroll up but instead trigger a refresh because they haven't realized they have already reached the top of the page.

Each unwanted refresh drains the cellular data plan for nothing and wastes battery charge and, most importantly, wastes time.

For this reason, the existence of pull-to-refresh forces the user to scroll up more carefully. Having to pay attention to avoid refreshes is annoying in and of itself.

Google itself states that the motivation behind pull-to-refresh is the following:

 

"Pull-to-refresh is an intuitive gesture popularized by mobile apps such as Facebook and Twitter. Pulling down on a social feed and releasing creates new space for more recent posts to be loaded."

 

Pull-to-refresh makes sense on an interface where new content comes from the top. However, as anyone knows, many websites in existence are not feed-based, making pull-to-refresh counter-intuitive.

Anyone who actually wants to refresh the page can already use the dedicated refresh button in the three-dot menu.

CSS is no solution.

Google itself provides a CSS (cascading style sheet) property to disable pull-to-refresh, however, this is only useful to site owners. Any given user can not edit the CSS on over 99.99% of web sites in existence, so an option for disabling pull-to-refresh is necessary.

Why does this matter? According to SimilarWeb, Chrome is the most popular web browser on smartphones.  If thousands of users are complaining about pull-to-refresh, then it is safe to assume that many more are suffering from it in silence.

 

Pull-to-refresh is obsolete.

Pull-to-refresh was originally invented to save screen real estate that would normally be used on refresh buttons. Given that smartphone screens have grown and that Chrome already has a refresh button in its submenu that can be accessed faster than pull-to-refresh because it does not require scrolling up, the need for a pull-to-refresh gesture simply doesn't exist.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, three to four-inch smartphone screens were normal, so there was a greater need for saving screen real estate, unlike nowadays where phone screens are, in comparison, gigantic.

An option in a submenu also has the benefit that it can not cause refreshes accidentally because it isn't triggered by the same finger movement that is responsible for scrolling up.

An alternative to pull-to-refresh would be to only reveal a refresh button when pulling down at the top, not immediately refreshing. This would both save the screen real estate (if that matters) and not cause accidental refreshes.

 

Please make it optional.

An option to turn of pull-to-refresh would be great. This might be the most sought-after feature in Chrome. Thousands have asked for it.

It is just a simple toggle in the setting menu. Creating this option shouldn't be too difficult for the Chrome developers and there are no disadvantages in adding an option to turn off pull-to-refresh. Anyone who actually likes it can leave it on.

Do it please. Show you care about your users.