Beta Beat: Firefox 3 betas add support for multitouch

Do you own one of those fanciful new MacBooks? You know, the ones with the cool multitouch trackpads? Do you envy Safari users that can take advantage of multi-finger scrolling, pinching and squeezing in their web browsing? If so, you might be a perfect candidate for the new Firefox 3.1b2 beta.

Since October, Mozilla has been releasing preliminary builds of Firefox that allow you to use the gestures that are common among the Safari browsers out there; however, they've added some special gestures that are unique to Firefox. Some of these 3-finger gestures include:

Swipe Left/Right to move backward/forward through browsing history
Swipe Up/Down to move to top/bottom of web page
Pinch in/out to make the text larger or smaller
Twist left/right to move between open tabs

If you want to get your hands (quite literally) on the newest beta of Firefox, then head over to the Firefox 3 beta download website. There's still no word yet on when the final release of Firefox 3.1 with touch support is expected.

Special thanks to Tom Dyas for sharing his early builds.

[via MacRumors]

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Source: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

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Do you own one of those fanciful new MacBooks? You know, the ones with the cool multitouch trackpads? Do you envy Safari users that can...

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Romesh

I'm glad this is being supported properly by the app. I have twist to change tabs and 3 finger up/down to open and close tabs through MultiClutch, except that it causes Firefox to crash quite frequently

January 12 2009 at 4:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

85alex

Any word on whether this works with older Macbooks (and Pros)??

I mean, Google Maps does the pinching thing with the old ones, they support 2 finger clicking, at least some of those features should be able to carry over...

December 11 2008 at 12:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Olligarski

Now if there was a trackpad using multitouch for desktops!

December 11 2008 at 12:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Olligarski's comment

f00fighter

Agreed! Is there an add-on "multi-touch aware" trackpad for the non-laptop using crowd? I'd love to add one to my iMac...

December 11 2008 at 3:59 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

pman555123

yeah, MultiClutch does the same thing for me in firefox, but i would rather firefox did it natively. Only problem is, since this is a new beta, most plug-ins do not work with it. So, i had to uninstall it and go back to the stable version so that my plug-ins worked...so i still use MultiClutch for now until its stable.

December 11 2008 at 12:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Pepa

Guys, isn't this known among multitouch users for a month or so already?

December 11 2008 at 11:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

dorian

I've been using an application call MultiClutch that let's you apply multitouch to apps. I pretty much have the same setup but have swipe down for closing tabs.

December 11 2008 at 11:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

pixelthing

oh no - pinch text resizing - it's annoying enough on Safari to suddenly find text jumping up and down in size - please don't put it in Firefox too, or at least a proper preference setting to turn it off...

December 11 2008 at 11:29 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

leovst

Pinching to make text bigger and smaller is allready default in Safari.
And those left and right swipes I installed myself with multiclutch, the same gestures I use in Finder to go up and down the folders.

But other than that it's a nice feature.

December 11 2008 at 11:27 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

The Reptile

Now if they will only be allowed to do this on the iPhone the world would be a better place.

December 11 2008 at 11:19 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply