Multi-touch Gestures Built Into Firefox 3.1 Beta

Author	Gordon Kelly
Published	23rd Oct 2008

Multi-touch Gestures Built Into Firefox 3.1 Beta

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Now we're talking...

With all those fancy multi-touch capable new MacBooks released last week it hasn't taken Mozilla long to capitalise on their finger friendliness in a new experimental version of Firefox.

Firefox 3.1 pre-beta 2 has now emerged for Mac developers and Mozilla's Edward Lee is behind a build which is filled with useful and intuitive multi-touch gestures using two, three and even four finger commands. Highlights include three finger swipes left and right to navigate pages backwards or forwards, three finger vertical movements to jump to the top or bottom of pages, twisting clockwise to move through tabs from left to right and vice versa plus zooming in and out of a page via the traditional pinching.

Sadly at this stage, Lee admits he doesn't know if this finger friendliness will make it through to the final release (not expected until early next year) but given the inarguable logic behind them it would take a particularly cold hearted open source company to pull them. Besides, wouldn't third parties just build them back in?

All of which leaves Windows users (of which I'm one *sniff*) looking rather poe-faced until the arrival of the touchscreen embracing Windows 7. But even then, we have no idea just what hardware changes will be required to get the best out of it... *sigh*

Link:
via Ed Lee Developer Page