Unfortunately the forward/backward history navigation gesture doesn’t work out of the box in OS X Lion for Finder and Chrome. This is because both these applications (and maybe others) expect the gesture to be the same three finger navigation as it was in Snow Leopard, but by default Lion has configured this to be the new two finger gesture. We can get the old behaviour back by simply re-specifying this gesture back to the old three fingered gesture.
To do this, first disable the “Three finger drag” option which is available under the “Point & Click” tab in the Trackpad Preferences window in System Preferences:
This will however leave you without a gesture to move windows around with, but as a workaround you can enable the old one finger click and drag gesture as shown here.
Now to enable the three finger history navigation gesture, click on the “More Gestures” tab in Trackpad preferences and specify the “Swipe between pages” gesture to be “Swipe left or right with three fingers”:
You should now be able to navigate through the window history in both Finder and Chrome using three fingers.
