The latest Apple’s unibody MacBook/MacBook Pro laptops are coming with a multi-touch trackpad.
Thus, if you are one of the lucky owners, you can now not only enjoy multi-touch gestures on OS X, but on Firefox 3.5 as well!
The gestures feature of Firefox 3.5 is quite hidden, as you will not find it on the Preferences menus.
By typing “about:config” on the address bar, you will be able to view all gesture-related settings, and possibly change them according to your needs.
Here is a screenshot of the relevant section:
The default multi-touch gestures are:
Pinch-in (moving two fingers towards one another): Zoom out of the page
Pinch-out (moving two fingers away from one another): Zoom in the page
Swipe-left (drag three fingers to the left): Go back one page
Swipe-right (drag three fingers to the right): Go forward one page
Swipe-down (drag three fingers to the bottom): Scroll to the bottom of the page
Swipe-up (drag three fingers to the top): Scroll to the top of the page
There are two remaining multi-touch gestures, which are to said to be quite buggy, or not too user-friendly, and therefore by default do not have any assigned actions.
These are the twist-left/twist-right gestures (placing two fingers on the trackpad, and twist them left/right).
If you would like to assign two new actions for the twist gestures, you will have to open up the about:config page (screenshot above). Then, double-click on the “browser.gesture.twist.left”/”browser.gesture.twist.right”, and type your desired actions. The next most useful actions are the “switch to the next/previous tab”. Thus, if you need them, just type on the previous step, “Browser:PrevTab” (for the twist-left), “Browser:NextTab” (for the twist-right).
This is it, enjoy the multi-touch Firefox 3.5!
