Windows 10 LTSC - disabling swipe gestures in Edge browser in Kiosk mode

Question

I have a PC with a kiosk form factor - tall and narrow with a touchscreen. I've installed Windows 10 LTSC, as this was deemed suitable for a kiosk application. I've set up a Kiosk mode with a single app, an Edge browser pointed to a url on our server. It works fine, but there are these swipe gestures available to the kiosk user that are undesirable. Following some instructions I found online, I used Group Policy Editor to disable the following policy:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components Edge UI > Allow edge swipe

This has disabled the Windows swipe functionality that allows you to jump out of the current desktop, into an overview where you can add a new desktop (which in Kiosk mode will just be an empty black page). This is already a huge win, as that functionality allowed a kiosk user to get the screen to a state the next user might not be able to recover from (why is this even allowed in Kiosk mode, Microsoft?)

However there still remain the swipe gestures in the Edge browser itself: left-to-right for "History Back" and right-to-left for "History Forward". This is undesirable, because we want to restrict the navigation depending on the context. The user can't have the ability to arbitrarily perform the "History Back" or "History Forward" action on the browser.

I've learned I can disable this if I navigate to edge://flags, and disable the setting called "Overscroll history navigation". While I was at it I've also disabled "Elastic Overscroll", which stopped the page from being dragged every which way as the user swiped across the screen.

But herein lies the problem: I can do it while I'm logged in as the Admin user, which changes the setting for the Admin user. But I can't do this as Kiosk user. Kiosk user runs in Kiosk mode, which means only the browser window, showing the pre-selected website, no url bar, no access to browser settings, developer console, or the rest of Windows. (this is normally desirable, but it really complicates the initial setup). The only other action I can perform as the Kiosk user is press Ctrl+Alt+Delete (When I have the keyboard plugged in) to get the lock screen so I can switch the user to Admin.

I've looked up where these settings are stored. They are in

C:\Users[username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Local State

"Local State" being a file with no extension, containing a JSON that's all smushed into a single line. Through experimenting I found that changing the setting adds the following to the file:

 "browser": {
        "browser_build_version": "121.0.2277.112",
        "browser_version_of_last_seen_whats_new": "121.0.2277.98",
        "enabled_labs_experiments": [
            "elastic-overscroll@2",
            "overscroll-history-navigation@2"
        ],
        "last_redirect_origin": "",
        "last_seen_whats_new_page_version": "121.0.2277.83"
    },

So I tried adding this to those files manually (the Kiosk user has two folders, "User Data" and "User Data Kiosk"), but those changes don't stick. Even as I was editing the files, Notepad++ kept notifying me that someone else has changed the file and the file kept reverting to its original state.

How can I change these settings and make these changes stick?

Bonus question: Why are these settings under "enabled_labs_experiments"? What's "experimental" about wanting to turn off unwanted gestures?

EDIT: Some more thins I've tried: I tried disabling Kiosk mode - I unassigned the kiosk mode from the Kiosk user. I logged in as the Kiosk users, and disabled "Overscroll history navigation" and "Elastic Overscroll". It didn't help. The changes were saved in

C:\Users\Kiosk\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Local State

but now it's apparent that for the Kiosk mode the other folder is used:

C:\Users\Kiosk\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data Kiosk\Local State

The second thing I tried is I set the Kiosk mode Edge url to

edge://flags

This didn't work either. The system won't allow the Kiosk mode user to access the browser settings. Apparently this isn't just handled by hiding the url bar. Instead of edge://flags I got some weird welcome page. Once again the high security of the kiosk mode is preventing me from doing a proper setup.

Answer 1

While I wasn't able to change the setting in Edge, I discovered I could simply disable the behavior in the website's css:

html, body {
    overscroll-behavior: none;
}

The same works if you're using a Maui container app instead of a browser, FYI.

I hope this helps someone save some time.