Filed under: Software, Internet, Internet Tools, Beta Beat
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
Special thanks to Tom Dyas for sharing his early builds.
[via MacRumors]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
The Reptile said 11:20AM on 12-11-2008
Now if they will only be allowed to do this on the iPhone the world would be a better place.
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leovst said 11:27AM on 12-11-2008
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.
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craig Morey said 2:15PM on 12-11-2008
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...
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dorian said 12:09PM on 12-11-2008
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.
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Pepa said 1:21PM on 12-11-2008
Guys, isn't this known among multitouch users for a month or so already?
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pman555123 said 12:09PM on 12-11-2008
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.
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Olligarski said 12:12PM on 12-11-2008
Now if there was a trackpad using multitouch for desktops!
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f00fighter said 4:00PM on 12-11-2008
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...
Alex said 12:21PM on 12-11-2008
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...
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Romesh said 4:25PM on 1-12-2009
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
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