Mouse Gestures in Javascript

christodd writes "I have become big fan of mouse gestures, a feature included in Opera, Mozilla, and MyIE2. There's even a plugin for IE. Other programs like StrokeIt and Cocoa Gestures are also based around the concept. I can't believe nobody else has thought of this before, but what about mouse gestures in javascript? Turns out that it is incredibly simple to implement, and really handy for those 'feature incomplete' web browsers. Unfortunately, for the total user experience, we'd have to upgrade the whole internet..."

Comments

Re:... uses? ...

[Moraelin]

Well, good question. Doing one of those gestures really isn't any easier than just hitting a button or key. And downright useless to anyone using a trackball. _And_ it's entirely too easy to inadvertently do a gesture while just moving the mouse around, or while wiggling it to make the screensaver go away.

I guess it's one of those things which are supposedly cool just because Microsoft doesn't support it. Because, as we all know, Microsoft is evil ;)

Or in less sarcastic terms: IE just works well, while Mozilla is a bloated unstable piece of crap. Whose devs thought it would be more funny to go into phantasy land and reinvent their own bug reporting tool, and their own widget set, and whatnot, instead of delivering a stable product on time. They started with the legacy of Netscape being practically a synonim to "Internet", and drove it into the ground, to the point where it has less than 1% of the market now.

And Opera has _real_ interface problems. As a random example, I'd have preferred if they spent half an hour to fix their combo boxes to accept PgUp and PgDown, like all Windows combo boxes. It's a real pain to scroll through a list of links one line at a time, or to have to reach for the mouse, instead of using perfectly standard keys. But instead of that, hey, they have mouse gestures.

Basically, in even less flattering terms: when you're a fan of an inferior product, you'll want to make a big fuss about every single "feature" it has. Especially about those who are uninspired and unneeded. Just because it really doesn't have anything else.

And, of course, because it's fashionable to post about how much Microsoft sucks.

If Opera or Mozilla tomorrow came up with a device to kick the user in the nuts, I do believe we'd see the same gang screaming about how cool that is. And how Microsoft sucks because it failed to implement it too.