Add Multi-Touch gestures in Firefox [MAC]

Those big, spacious trackpads on Apple’s recent line of notebooks were built for fancy finger maneuvers. It just so happens that the two main Mac internet browsers – Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox – were built the same way.

Although a lot of people are keyboard freaks who like to touch the mouse or trackpad as little as possible, it might be time to consider going the opposite way. The functionality offered by Apple’s multi-touch MacBook trackpads is quite impressive and continues to get better with each software update. The only time I’ve been reaching for the keyboard lately is just to type letters & words, then it’s right back to the trackpad. Application switching and user interface navigation are so much smoother with the flick of a finger. Internet browsing is a great example of an area where these trackpads are being utilized.

Considering they make both the hardware and software for Macs, it’s logical that Apple would inject Safari with some multi-touch. What’s really surprising, though, is that Mozilla Firefox has taken it a step further and done even more with this technology. Firefox wins the battle of the browsers in this particular area merely because it supports more gestures at this point. But to start off, let’s go over the gestures that are currently available in both Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5.


3-Finger Swipe Left: Go back one page in the current tab’s history. It’s the same as pressing the Back button in the toolbar.
3-Finger Swipe Right: Go forward one page in the current tab’s history. Again, it’s the equivalent of pressing the Forward button.
2-Finger Pinch Together: Zoom in one level.
2-Finger Pinch Apart: Zoom out one level.

Pretty cool, right? You can even hold down the Command key while doing one of those 3-finger swipes to open the previous/next page in a new tab. Now let’s take a look at what only Firefox can do.

3-Finger Swipe Up: Instantly scroll to the top of the page.
3-Finger Swipe Down: Instantly scroll to the bottom of the page.
2-Finger Twist Left: Move to the tab to the left.
2-Finger Twist Right: Move to the tab to the right.

These are smart, time-saving gestures Apple needs to “borrow” for Safari immediately. However, there is one hitch… the twisting gestures are not enabled in Firefox by default. We need to turn those on ourselves, and here’s how:

1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in Firefox’s address bar and accept the intimidating warning message that comes up.
2. Type “twist” in the search field or scroll down the long list until you find items that start with “browser.gesture.twist”.
3. Double-click the “browser.gesture.twist.left” entry and type “Browser:PrevTab”. Press OK.
4. Double-click the “browser.gesture.twist.right” entry and type “Browser:NextTab”. Press OK.
5. Double-click the “browser.gesture.twist.threshold” entry and type “40″. This adjusts the level of sensitivity and can be changed to your preference, but I found 40 to be an acceptable value. A lower number would be more erratic and a higher number would be more sluggish. Press OK.

There you have it – basic multi-touch gestures on modern MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs that enhance your internet browsing productivity in both Safari and Firefox.

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Voyage Visualizes Your Surfing History

The Firefox web browser stores a history of visited websites in a database. These information can then be accessed at a later time and are also linked with several other mechanisms of the web browser including the address bar. The history function is on the other hand not the most comfortable solution especially when trying to find a website that was accessed at a specific time or from a specific starting location.

Voyage is a Firefox add-on that can visualize the surfing history of the user. It starts to record the visited websites and their relation right after installation and can be accessed at anytime by entering about:voyage into the Firefox address bar. The same screen is also accessible from the History > Voyage menu.

Voyage displays each visited website in a circle that displays the website’s favicon in the center. The circle size changes depending on the number of visits to a website so that the most popular destinations can be recognized on first glance.

Hovering the mouse over a circle will display the relations to other circles by drawing lines to them. It will furthermore display a maximum of three page titles of pages that have been visited on the domain and the total amount of pages that have been accessed.

A left-click on a circle will open the full list of pages that have been accessed on the domain. Information displayed include the page title, time the resource was accessed and the from and to relations to other circles.

Another interesting option is the Twitter integration of Voyage which allows Twitter users to integrate the last 90 days of Twitter to a maximum of 500 tweets in the timeline.

Voyage is an interesting Firefox add-on that can be useful for users who would like to work with a visual representation of their surfing history. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox 3.5+ versions and can be downloaded directly from the Mozilla Add-on repository.

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