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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."
I just read this headline and all I could think of was a prostitute mouse hawking an AOL CD with Netscape on it. *shudders* I blame the poor quality of coffee in this facility.
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
Use keyboard shortcuts. They're quicker, and as an added benefit don't give you RSI.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
This story is a bit unclear.. please don't just post user menus as exposition, thanks.
Goat sex free since 2001
Sensiva is a nice tool for mouse gesturing, prety efficient too.
Esp. useful for keyboard-repellant people =)
I don't think a mouse is the best tool to use for gestures, they don't have the finest movement. Maybe a laptop trackpad...
Now, if you could use a Wacom tablet, it'd be more like Palm Graffitti. Pen to the left for forward, back for backward, tap the link...I oughta try it out.
>OptiMoz (a.k.a. MozGest) is a XPI for Mozilla allowing Mouse Gestures to be available
:).
Now I can see IE6.5 having this integrated and calling it XP-Innovation (or Immitation, you choose).
Still, it's nice, but normally when you surf the web you input data as well, so aren't keyboard shortcuts a more "productive" solution?
One extra thing I use often on the mouse are the 2 side buttons linked to "back" and "foward", these 2 are great, if your mouse isn't a dexxa and you always accidently press on them while moving the mouse
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
When I read this post, I immediately ran to mozdev and installed it. This is really cool! Now you can browse in complete full-screen without having to rely on context menus. Using the keyboard shortcuts (as has been suggested) is not as easy because I usually surf using only the mouse and switching my attention back and forth between keyboard and screen is quite cumbersome. In short: this completely ROCKS!!!
I remember them working really well in Black and White...
What's the gesture to set fire to a web-page?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
There used to be software called Pointix (for windows) that allowed you to navigate easily by making more unique gestures. With mozilla you have to click and drag, but with pointix you could make a counter-clockwise circle-motion with the mouse, and it would interpret that as "back." As long as you don't make idle circular motions with the mouse it worked wonderfully. I'd like to see those gestures incoporated into this project.
(the full list of gestures: clockwise circle, counterclockwise circle, quick side-to-side motion, quick forward-back motion)
You've never used the gestures in Opera for more then a few seconds, have you? Once you get used to them, you'll swear by them.
A quick set of down-up's on a bunch of links on a news site, and they're all loading in new windows in the background.
Down-Right, and a window closes.
Down, in new window in the forground.
Up-Down, refresh.
This is really only scraching the surface, but they are the ones I personally use.
With these gestures, I can browse the web with literally only the mouse, and still use it as easily as if I had access to keyboard shortcuts.
Sure, it's not for everyone, and I'm still split 50/50 between my usage of keyboard commands and gestures, but don't call something a gimmic just because YOU don't like it.
Actully, I left off the 'left' and 'right' movement gestures for back and forward. I use them a lot too ;)
Installed it under Mozilla 0.9.4. The toolbar shows up, but the gestures don't seem to be working no matter what I do. Hmn. Am I doing the gestures wrong? Anyone else having the problem?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Will plugins like this work with Galeon / K-Mealon?
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
For those not aware, "still-pumped-from-using-the-mouse" is an allusion to Scott Adams' Dilbert book "Still Pumped From Using The Mouse". It's a compilation of the strips from 12/14/92 - 9/27/93, and you can actually get it used for about $0.75 + s/h.
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
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
Funny. I use Mozilla all day and every day and it rarely crashes. Better yet is NS 6.1 which has to be one of the most stable pieces of software I've ever used.
Also, from the experience I've had, the user you're running mozilla under has to be able to write to the mozilla directory to install plugins. So I su root, install the plugin, then re-start in user mode. The plugin then appears.
What's more, if there is something that doesn't have a shortcut you can go into the chrome and add one easily enough.
Now, think about the implication of this for a moment. Picture a user who has a mouse with only two buttons. And who has Emulate3Buttons switched on. For those who don't know, this allows the user to simulate a press on the (non-existant) middle button by pressing left and right simultaneously. However, we humans are not very precise as far as timing goes, and we're bound to press one of those two buttons slightly ahead of the other. End result: the browser appears to have "a mind of its own" because it keeps jumping back and forth as soon as you try to select a block of text...
Browser developers: if you feel the strong urge to implement such a feature, please make it optional, and off by default. Such a feature could be especially annoying when accidentally triggered on a page where the user has spent half an hour filling out a lengthy survey form. One bad click, and you have to restart from scratch.
I have a 450Mhz machine and it runs great. Certainly the UI needs speeding up somewhat but for page rendering and general responsiveness it is well up to scratch. I have even run it on a P133 running Linux over X and it's still pretty usable.
It's not just that keyboard controls are good on general principles; it's also the ridiculous extent to which browsers neglect them. Do you realize that when the focus is in the page (> 90% of the time), almost every single keypress does absolutely nothing? What a waste!
I would give my left foot for a vim-like mode in mozilla. Flexible and powerful navigation, visual selection, one-key incremental regex searches, marks and jumps, macros. Some modifications would be necessary for a browser environment, but I think most of the endearing non-editing properties of vim could be carried over.
So, anyone want to write this?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
atleast for me, as I keep wiggling the mouse, marking random text and pressing buttons while I read a page. Dunno why, compulsive disorder probably. ;)
:)
Atleast I learned pretty quick not to mark text text and press middle mousebutton in mozilla.
//Humming
I'm too stupid to preview.
I'm just about at the end of my wick over certain mozilla bugs, such as the myriad problems with cursor management in textareas. Over the last six months to a year, I swear Moz has moved backwards in getting rid of these kinds of piddling little problems - problems which, in my opinion, absolutely prevent its wider acceptance.
The usual reply is that you can't prevent people from working on what they want to work on. Well guess what, if the piddling little bugs aren't fixed, there won't BE an open source browser for you to add your favorite little quirks to.
I'm composing this in Moz and if I hit the right arrow button at the end of a line, the cursor will go to the top of the text area. If I hit the down arrow key, it will create a hidden EOL. Sometimes entire lines of text just disappear and then re-appear. Sometimes unhighlighted text remains highlighted. Once in a while it even crashes, which I like because then at least something has a chance of getting attention.
It's so bush, too, that's the problem with it. Looks like Moz can manage to claim compatibility with important WWW standards but CAN'T MANAGE STANDARD TEXT EDITING.
You can complain about me complaining, but my contribution is not coding, and all my words are out of frustration for seeing these stupid little bugs live on for month after month. To live to make it into milestone after milestone. And the worst part is, IT USED TO WORK PERFECTLY. At some point, probably last spring, text editing was BROKEN. WTF, people?
And I won't even mention how many times the window focus problems have changed but not improved in the last six months. And to think that, a year ago, I though Moz was three months away from "ready".
But in browsers there's another level of unpredictability that is a pain. You never know where the next tab is going to leave you. Could be any number of input forms, or a URL, or maybe you didn't realize it and your focus isn't on the page... it makes navigation with a keyboard near-impossible. Of course, this is largely true for any complicated GUI form. Browsers just happen to be the most common complicated GUI in use.
I suppose it's because keyboards are good for modal or serial interfaces, where mice are better for more random-access interfaces. OTOH, with you use the keyboard to its full potential (i.e., as more than just a bunch of shortcuts) the keyboard can be far more expressive (e.g., CLI). But I don't have any clever ideas on how to map that to a web page.
A quick set of down-up's on a bunch of links on a news site, and they're all loading in new windows in the background.
a simple click on the thumb knob of my logitech MouseMan Optical also opens a link in a new window, with little mouse movement (point at link, middleclick) , okay, it doesn't open in the background, but that's beside the point.
You can view the list here. This is for Windows version and I was using Opera v5.12. This is sweet! I can't wait to use this with Mozilla and Galeon. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Here are some ideas that might help:
- bug 66285 use a different shortcut to navigate tabs and to navigate links
- bug 67684 directional keyboard navigation: instead using Tab for "go to next focusable element", you could use Alt+Shift+right for "go to closest focusable element to the right".
- Web pages should use accesskeys more often. For example, on msn, you can press Alt+S to jump to the search field. Removing the search menu (bug 67414) from Mozilla would make it easier for page authors to use the Alt+S shortcut, giving accesskeys a much higher chance of becoming ubiquitous.
- bug 37638 the URL bar has initial focus too often (for example, when you start the browser). It's usually better for the page in the content area to have focus, so the user can scroll the page using the keyboard. Worse, accesskeys stop working (bug 64606) when the location bar has focus
- bug 66597 after searching the page, Tab should go to an element after the beginning of the selection rather than the first element on the page. Combined with inline search (find-as-you-type, with no dialog), this would make it easier to jump to links.
You should also check out the netscape.public.mozilla.accessibility newsgroup. Mozilla's accessibility team spends a lot of time making sure the browser works well with the keyboard, in part because blind users can't use pointing devices easily.The shareholder is always right.
I had the same problem until I downloaded a previous version of the install.js from cvs. Now it works just fine.
Poorly chosen modes can be terrible, and modes in general tend to cause difficulty for beginners. But only a brainwashed UI weenie would say "modes are bad". Do you really think that all of the hackers who find unix and vi to be the most productive work environment are masochists?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I disagree on the URL bar issue. I'm always annoyed in IE's tendency to start with the page getting focus. Personally, I rarely even look at the page that just opened with the browser window unless I used "open in new window", often opening new windows just for new browsing. In this case, the URL bar is what should have focus.
Here's a list of a few new features that the Moz team have been debating, also inspired by the trend-setting video game, Black & White:
This follows after the B&W 'creature' concept. An animated "buddy" tries to watch how you browse the web, and learns what pages to prefetch or submit every morning for you. You can scratch/fondle/slap your MozCreature to reinforce its tendency to discover new free porn for you, or punish the MozCreature to ensure that you never again wake up to find many First Posts on slashdot in your name. Lizard, Gnome, Ximian or Shadowman character art choices are included, but many more risquee "skin" packs are hitting the popular theme sites already. Caution: while the MozCreature can eat ad banners, a steady diet of ad banners will send the MozCreature into an IIS-defacing frenzy.
The concept of bookmarks is antiquated in modern internet terms. Once your MozCreature is on the loose, you can use your MozLeash module to assist in the training of the creature; limit their browsing domain to any hostmask or subnet you like, or avoid the MozCreature's tendency to battle for supremacy on many popular websites. Leashing your MozCreature to other popular applications such as the GIMP, nmap or GPG is also possible, but it's up to you to observe the truly remarkable effects while you train your MozCreature to full proficiency.
Adding new JavaScript tags to your websites attracts your MozVillagers to point, click, play and explore your websites more than any real web visitor would. These MozVillager scripts will aid in your site's ad revenues by cavorting around GIF web-bugs as if in reverence, and occasionally clicking-thru to your sponsor sites to increase your marketing manna. The MozCreature, properly trained, can create and publish new MozVillager web scripts on your behalf, but remember, your MozCreature may end up teaching your competition some stupid web tricks as well.
All in all, Mozilla's ever-expanding suite of features, copied from every other application under the sun, shows the power and flexibility of the community development process. Netscape never had the temerity to battle it out, but armed with the MozCreature, MozLeash and MozVillager features, a new mythical landscape redefines the browser wars. Redmond's Clippy has never been in such peril.
[
I have voted for all the relevant bugs.
Yup, I've been up and down Bugzilla making sure that all the complaints that I can verify are already noted accurately.
There are the bugs that I've been tracking:
83650: textarea control has problems with caret positioning at end
82151: Right arrow key at end of a TEXTAREA goes to the beginning
68331: Moving caret in TEXTAREA to start of line can cause page to scroll horizontally
75629: Need better support for setting selection in text inputs and textareas
88024: Down arrow key creates fake line break at the end of a TEXTAREA
74383: textarea input form crashed during complex edit session
During the composition of this reply, I encountered and had to work around several of these.
Thank you for posting the bug numbers. I'm going to vote for some of these, because these are major bugs, and I'm experiencing them, too. Hopefully other readers will do the same.
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.
Mozilla never runs for me as root, except on the initial install. Weird.
It scrolls through its debugging crap, then just hangs. As my normal user, it runs fine. This is 0.9.4, at the moment. This is with full rights to the X display. I also tried running even X as root, with the same result. Why won't mozilla run as root?
Anybody know wazzupwiddat???
gimick: No entry found for gimick in the dictionary.
...
gimmick: a device employed to cheat, deceive...
Always adds to your credibility when you know how to spell
Yes, I've always thought so.
deus does not exist but if he does
I run a lot of nightlies, so I just install mozilla as my login user after making /usr/local/mozilla owned by me. Works great and saves having to su every time I install a plugin or new release.
Actully, I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer, and find myself using the gestures anyway...
not only do somehow twist my statement into insult EVERY unix user
I'm sure there are unix users who avoid modal applications, but the common unix experience is highly modal. And this is not an insult.
but you also get that moronic leap of logic modded up
Uh, no. I got my other moronic leaps of logic modded up, so my score starts at 2.
And you even throw a couple insults my way also. Bravo!
-bows-
(You made a glib criticism, so I took the liberty of calling you a funny name. Welcome to slashdot.)
Modes are bad. Very bad. I'll even give you an example.
Your example had nothing to do with modes. You didn't show that modes are bad in general or that vi is bad in particular. Try this on: in every browser I've seen, the navigation keys behave differently if you're in a text box (they move in the text box, not the page). This is a mode. Is it bad?
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Do you really think that all of the hackers who find unix and vi to be the most productive work environment are masochists?
People blame themselves for design mistakes. They don't know the difference between system problems and their own errors. In UNIX, the jock thing to do is to laugh at anyone who makes errors, so that doesn't contribute to a calm and sensible examination of errors caused by bad system design. "It works for me -- what are you, some kind of newbie?"
Tim
Nope, that's not beside the point..
Loading in the background has got nothing to do with mouse gestures. you could change the behaviour of the middle mouse button to open in the background too. which is way easier/faster than a mouse gesture.