Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 'pre' With Multi-Touch Gestures

Edward Lee has released a version of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 which includes support for Multi-Touch gestures.

Below you can read his introduction to the build...

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Earlier I took the Firefox patch and tweaked it slightly to conform better to sdwilsh style standards ;) and added various refactoring. And now I've tossed those pair of patches up on the try-server so people can touch Firefox with a new set of gestures.


A quick detour for those not familiar with the multi-touch gestures.. The most basic multi-touch gesture is the 2-finger scroll which has been around for over 3 years (my iBook had it), and it lets you scroll through pages up/down/left/right/diagonally. Recently added is the 3-finger "swipe" where you place 3 fingers on the trackpad and move them in any direction like the 2-finger scroll. A couple other iPhone-inspired gestures are the "pinch" (2 fingers moving towards/away from each other) and the "twist" (2 fingers rotating).

Note! The following gestures are totally tentative and subject to change, and I'm not sure if they'll even make it into Firefox 3.1. (From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!) You have been warned! :P

* Swipe Left: Go back in history [bonus! hold Cmd to open it in a tab]
* Swipe Right: Go forwards in history
* Swipe Up: Return to top of page
* Swipe Down: End of page
* Pinch Together: Zoom out
* Pinch Apart: Zoom in
* Twist Right: Next tab
* Twist Left: Previous tab

Personally, the biggest benefit is the ease of going to the very next tab with just the touchpad. No need to use keyboard shortcuts like cmd-alt-right or fn-ctrl-down or cmd-tab#. Rotating to the right doesn't just go to the next tab because if you keep twisting right, you'll go to the next one and the next one. You could think of it as turning a dial to pick the tab you want. And of course, turning the dial back in the same motion switches back to the previous tab.


So if all that sounds interesting and you want to try, make sure you have one of these machines before downloading:
- MacBook Pro from this year (either early-2008 model or the new late-2008 ones)
- MacBook Air (both models from 2008)
- MacBook from late 2008 (the new aluminum ones)
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