Firefox 4 Beta: Experimenting With Multi-touch | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 4 Beta: Experimenting With Multi-touch

hacks.mozilla.org

15 pointsCitizenKane10 comments

Why doesnt Mozilla adopt the already widely deployed JavaScript touch API that is already implemented and widespread in Mobile Safari and in the Android Browser?

I have used that API a lot lately in my project and it works excellent. The API concept in this Mozilla effort seems exactly the same only different names for everything. NIH syndrome?

They probably want to do something new and not just try to play catch-up. I'm sure at some point they will be standardized, but with different implementation (and possibly different behavior), it's probably safer to have different APIs for now.

Oh, come on, how different can "MozTouchDown" be from "touchstart", "MozTouchMove" from "touchmove", etc? And if they are different isn't that a dick move in itself? It's like Microsoft insisting on its own DOM event apis for no good reason. It achieves nothing, prevents nothing, just acts as a pain in the ass to everyone.

I assume the JS Touch APIs are for apple hardware only, or 4% of Firefox users.

Wrong. There is nothing in a high level JavaScript API that is hardware, or even operating system dependent.

Also, as I forgot to mention before, this API is already implemented in Chrome desktop browser.

Doing your multitouch development on Windows 7 seems kind of bizarre. Even with a vastly smaller userbase, I would bet there are more people using multitouch gestures on the Mac (multitouch trackpads on the incredibly popular notebook line, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad on the desktop), so you'd be a lot more likely to get the feature exercised.

Not knocking it. It's cool to see people working on the cutting edge. The choice of platform just struck me as weird.

FTA: you can probably already access Apple’s trackpads via javascript. The problem is that Apple has already built a bunch of system level gesture support into them so you’d have to figure out how to override that first.

Any many of reasons,

Win7 may have a simpler apis then OSX to do more with multi-gesture that isn't the pre-canned pinch/swipe etc actions.

The developers may have received funding from Microsoft.

The developers may have had more access to Win7 multi-touch tablets etc.

In this case, since it's a direct manipulation interface, a multi-touch screen makes more sense than a multi-touch trackpad

Multi-touch events are all based on screen coordinates (ie. you're touching the screen). While it might be helpful to read multitouch events from trackpads in web applications, it's not really the same thing.

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