12 November 2010 - 18:39Swipe Up for Top; Swipe Right for Tabs

Now that Firefox 4 Beta 7 [mozilla.com] is out, some people trying it out on their Macs are giving frowny faces to some behavior changes [input.mozilla.com]. (But others are 🙂 to find an easy way to view all their tabs.)

In particular, doing a 3-finger swipe upwards no longer brings you to the top of the page. Some people have pointed to about:config to change the preferences to switch back to the old behavior. But if that sounds too complex, you can just install an add-on to do the dirty work for you. Just click the following install link, and you’re ready to swipe! No need to restart.

Install Swipe Top [addons.mozilla.org]: Swipe up to scroll to the top of the page (and down to the end).

I’ve also made another related add-on that changes the default behavior of swiping right and left, so instead of going forwards and backwards in the current tab’s history, it’ll switch tabs.

Install Swipe Tabs [addons.mozilla.org]: Swipe right to switch to the next tab (and left to the previous).

For both these add-ons, you can install them and try them immediately without restarting Firefox. If you want to get to the original Panorama and navigation behavior, just hold the “command” key while swiping. Or you can just disable or uninstall the add-on to get the original behavior as well without restarting.

If you’re interested in how I wrote the add-ons, you can check out the source for Swipe Top [github.com] and Swipe Tabs [github.com].