Every day, millions of users choose the Firefox browser to navigate the web. Mozilla Corporation, the creator of Firefox, is committed to providing the best web browser experience in today’s market in order to retain their existing users and to attract new ones. In particular, modern users expect the same touch features found on their mobile devices to be present on their laptops and desktops as well.

Multi-Touch Gestures for Firefox, done in collaboration with Mozilla Firefox developers, provides improved gesture support for Firefox Apple OS X and Microsoft Windows by introducing pinch and rotate gesture features, as well as double-tap on OS X. The gestures are input using a trackpad or touchscreen capable of recognizing multiple touches simultaneously, which are standard on many current laptop models and is available as an accessory for the iMac.

Multi-Touch Gestures for Firefox provides the ability to use the pinch or double-tap gestures to zoom in or out while surfing the web. These two gestures work on any web page.

The rotate gesture allows the user to rotate an image opened directly (known as a synthetic image document). Unlike the zooming gestures, which are featured in other web browsers, this new rotate feature is unique to Firefox.

Gesture recognition is performed by the operating system. The resulting gesture events are sent to Firefox. JavaScript is used to create XUL elements and CSS properties that display the rotated or zoomed web content.