Firefox 4 to bring multi-touch support

Posted on 13 Aug 2010 at 11:11

The Mozilla Foundation has launched the latest preview version of its up-coming Firefox 4 web browser, and for those with touch-enabled devices there's some good news: support for multi-touch functionality in Windows 7.

If you're lucky enough to have a Windows 7-based slate, tablet, or just a touch-screen PC, Firefox 4 will bring integrated support for touch-based interaction to a desktop web browser for the first time.

Although the technology has yet to be adopted by web developers, a video demonstrating the potential of the multi-touch functionality has been posted by Mozilla - and there are some impressive features on offer for those sites that choose to support the new technology.

While devices such as Apple's iPad have supported multi-touch in native applications for quite some time, it's never been possible to pass that information back to a website. As a result, while programs running on the device itself - such as a photo gallery - support a wide range of multi-touch functions, websites had to make do with simple pinch-to-zoom options.

Mozilla's work on multi-touch in Firefox 4 promises to change all that, making touch-screen friendly websites for the first time - although currently the functionality is limited to Windows 7 only, with no mention if other operating systems will be supported by launch.

If you're willing to play with a pre-release version, you can download Firefox 4 Beta 3 now.

Author: Gareth Halfacree

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