There’s an interesting set of diagrams and discussion over at the Mozilla Wiki about adding multitouch and gesturing to Firefox.

It doesn’t mention what this is in response to — Apple MacBook multitouch trackpad, perhaps, or the increasing number of mobile devices with touchscreens — but of course it is dependent on associated hardware to work correctly.

A device that could input touch data for two or more fingers could integrate with Firefox and allow for a number of commands to be executed without either mouse or keyboard shortcut input (though these could perhaps be used as modifiers).

What I really like is the “create new gesture” that would allow users to add their own commands — gesture macros if you like — which would execute based on a specific set of touch inputs.

This is something that’s not really been well explored on mainstream devices. Even the iPhone has a relatively small set of gestures in the main user interface, though individual apps could always add to this.

Having this in Firefox is all very well. Now how about it rolled out across the operating system. Both Apple and Microsoft are totally capable of doing this.

How about support for gesture input on other surfaces, like this really cool video on scratch input:

Related posts:

Apple orders more Touch Screens from Taiwan
DIY Firewall
Google Earth for the iPhone
Firefox 1.5 RC1 Available & “Extend Firefox” Announced
Firefox 1.0.3 Critical Vunlerabilities

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