I've been hoping for this for many years. Without requiring new buttons or keys, an interesting strategy would be to make the "history forward" gesture/key/button follow the "next" link. Assuming sane use of next and previous this works well for viewers that start at the beginning. What to do for the "back" function is ambiguous when previous doesn't match to history, as in a case where a viewer lePt Ito the middle of content via a search.

Opera has that already — Forward button becomes "Fast Forward" and if you use Spacebar to scroll to the bottom, it will automatically follow "next" link.

Ironically, HTML5 recently dropped bunch of link relationships because of lack of browser and search engine support.

The pentadactyl add-on (used to be vimperator) for FF does this, ]] for next, [[ for previous. I believe it first checks for 'rel=' links, then links that contain 'prev', 'back', '<<' or similar snippets.

Hopefully this catches on, and we can use this instead of every site trying to have its own keyboard shortcuts (j/k or left/right or z/x/c, that last one being especially stupid for non-qwerty typists).

I'd love to be able to swipe left or right to navigate pages on a tablet.

For probably five or six years now, OmniWeb (for Mac) has had a feature that scanned the page for something that looked like a "next" link, and chooses it if you press Enter (a distinct key from Return on Mac keyboards). Very useful for browsing multi-page documents and for crawling webcomic archives.

They did: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87428 it got removed at some point, but there used to be a toolbar with various link elements, prev, next, alternate version, etc.

Yup, on Chrome it seems that Alt-N goes to the next page and Alt-P goes to the previous one. I really wish more web sites supported it, though.

I've used the "Link Widgets" plugin for Firefox, which does a very good job of guessing and setting alt+pgup/pgdn to forward and back.