Slashdot Mirror
Mouse Gestures in Mozilla
Jedbro writes: "I have really enjoyed the mouse gestures in Opera since its release, since then I have come across an awesome new project at Mozdev, called OptiMoz. OptiMoz (a.k.a. MozGest) is a XPI for Mozilla allowing Mouse Gestures to be available. It works great with Mozilla 0.9.4 and nightly builds.
It currently has Gestures for: *New Tab Window (Moz Tabs!!) *Forward in History *Backward in History *Reload *New Document *Up a directory in the URL *View Source *View Cookies for Current Domain *View Meta Data for Domain and *Access Homepage."
In a way, Slashdot is to thank for this. Back when Mozilla 0.9.2 was released, there was a +5 comment on the possibility of Opera-like gestures. That led people to read about gestures in bug 76537 and, from there, the community stepped up to the plate (specifically, Andy Edmonds). Nice.
:).
Now, if only we could work together and get some working spellchecking for Mozilla
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
They were my least favorite part of that Black & White game.. If they work anything like that in Mozilla then why bother? With your other hand on the keyboard you can just use keyboard shortcuts which take one press instead of opposing movements. The only thing I ever use the mouse for is clicking on a link anyway. Everything else involoving the mouse is so unnatural to do with your hands. If it weren't for graphical web browsers and quake, I would never use my mouse at all. It may just be that I have really big hands, but I just find resting my hand on a mouse (they're all too small) makes my hand curl unnaturally. I don't even want to get in to the scroll wheel...
I got an M$ Intellimouse with 5 buttons + wheel
.. this is WAY more convinient than every possible guesture, just press ur thumb , and page back.
... Any ideas ? Do i need to fill out a mozilla bug ? :)
(if u count the wheel as buttonts, then it has 7)
In IE the 4th button is the Page back feature
Any way to configure Mozilla to have the same behavior ? The best i found is using key for page pack, but as written below u need 2 hands for that
This is a fun feature, and I'm sure people will get a kick out of it. But gestures don't seem like a good "expert" way to browse -- the keyboard offers faster, more accurate input. And you are absolutely right about the RSI: since I started using my keyboard for almost everything (except web browsing, ah..) my wrist problems have gotten much better.
What I'd really like to see is more ways to browse with the keyboard. I don't have any ideas in particular (being able to use the arrows to move around in a spatial way instead of tabbing through links in order would be a plus), but I would definitely learn and use any system that's better than what I've got now.
...Only Konquerer and IE left to go...
Courtesy of Mike Pilone and DCOP, KDE has had this for a couple of months: Gesture Recognition for KDE. Not just Konquerer you can control either. The project is here.
troodon.net
I'm curious. What's wrong with context menus?
The problem with context menus, especially since they activate on mousedown-then-mouseup (instead of just mousedown) is that they offer no muscle memory. With Netscape 4.x, for instance, the context menu activated on mousedown. That allowed such movements as mousedown - drag right - select Back - release button, all in one stroke. Now, with the contextmenu activating on mouseup (after mousedown), muscle memory no longer comes into play.
But, that's where mouse gestures come in. Sure, it may take a few minutes to learn. But, after a while, it's all second nature and you don't even need to think about it -- just like how copy-n-pasting is probably effortless to you since "your fingers" know all the right keys to press without you having to consciously think about it.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
The problem that important bugs remain unfixed seems to stem from a lack of knowledge and motivation for developers to concentrate on the important stuff. All bugs are considered equal. So when everything is equal, it seems to be logical to do what looks "cool" to you instead of what may actually be important. On the other hand, if fixing important bugs increases your status in the Mozilla community more than adding features, the problems you describe are likely to go away soon.
I notice that Bugzilla already has a voting system. That is good. However, it seems to be mostly unused. That is bad. Why is that so? Probably because the voting interface is deeply integrated into the complex Bugzilla interface, which most end users will never access directly (let alone create an account for, which is necessary to vote) but only through the templates -- but you need the end users to vote on the most annoying bugs. How can that be changed? Perhaps all reported bugs should also be automatically submitted to a collaborative weblog like Kuro5hin. Scoop, the K5 engine, is open source. It allows users to vote on "stories" submitted, either to the front page or to a page section. In this specific application, users would have to decide which bugs and feature suggestions are very important, which ones are relatively important, and which ones are irrelevant.
This seems to be the simplest solution -- many others are possible, from improving the Bugzilla interface to integrating Bugzilla bugs into an existing weblog. You could also create a new native interface to report and rate bugs (and to rate the users who rate bugs), but that is the most time-intensive approach (if the most promising).
In general, I think that the current state of Mozilla reveals a clear weakness in the development model, one which is likely to only show up in very large projects. Improving the interface(s) to rate bugs and feature suggestions and to find the bugs that really matter should be a priority -- and the tools to do that could be useful to others, as well.
And if you have ever used OS/2 Warp with Netscape (which was speech enabled on the OS/2 platform), you'd see how crummy your gestures are. Try surfing hands free. No mouse required. Speak a link that is on the page, it goes there. No pointy-clicky required.
Or just use w3m , and get vim-like bindings to your web browsing :)
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