Three Finger Swipe Broken After Mac OS X Mountain Lion Update 10.8.5

Troubleshooting
January 12, 2014
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From completely dysfunctional to erratic functionality – Apple’s advanced three finger swipe gesture has been widely reported to be broken ever since the last Mac OS X Mountain Lion update to 10.8.5.

Typically, the three finger swipe can be setup within the Mac OS X Trackpad System Preferences to be used to do any of the following:

swipe between pages – which not only works in Safari but also in Finder windows
swipe between full-screen apps

Despite the many reported attempts at more typical solutions, eg restores and deleting preferences the issue seems to remain.

The final answer lies in resetting the hardware. Namely the System Management Controller (SMC).

Apple’s knowledge base article on how to go about resetting your Mac’s SMC can be found here.

Mack

In 1978, founders Matt and Hendricks were looking for a tech event to showcase their new startup. When they couldn’t find one that checked all the boxes they decided to host their own. As they were organizing things, they soon realized they needed somewhere to promote the conference, and that’s how newsweb.com was launched. It later became a blog and the result is what you are looking at right now.