The never-tiring folks at Mozilla are already hard at work on implementing multitouch events in Firefox. Felipe Gomes has posted a short demonstration of very cool multitouch capabilities via a few simple use cases. Here is the clip and a few words from the man himself.
Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe.
We’re working on exposing the multitouch data from the system to regular web pages through DOM Events, and all of these demos are built on top of that. … We have three new DOM events (MozTouchDown, MozTouchMove and MozTouchRelease), which are similar to mouse events, except that they have a new attribute called streamId that can uniquely identify the same finger being tracked in a series of MozTouch events.
They are also adding CSS support to allow styling for touch-enabled devices. However, strangely they’re using a pseudo-selector :-moz-system-metric(touch-enabled) instead of CSS media property. Then again, this is just the first draft, things are bound to change before this comes to a Firefox near you.
In any case, this some very cool stuff. Between Windows 7’s support for multi-touch, falling tablet prices, not to mention the rumored Apple tablet and the general surge of touch devices in the marketplace, it’s a great time to start adding some multitouch support to apps that never had it before and basically just playing around with them, seeing what we can do with them. After all, resizing and cropping images are fairly limited use cases, but when mainstream desktop apps (such as Firefox) have multitouch, plenty of people will come up with whole new ways to do familiar things, or just ways to do things we’ve never even thought of.
