Thunderbird Multi-touch Gesture Support for OS X

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Project Name

Bug-465257 - Thunderbird should support multi-touch gestures on OS X

Project Description

Currently Firefox has multi-touch support gestures built into it, but Thunderbird has yet to include them. The types of gestures and what they do for Thunderbird seem to be capable of being different between the two projects. But nonetheless, some of the coding is in place in Firefox and those links are on the Bugzilla page already to view those code elements. Its now a matter implementing a step by step process for implementing these gestures and testing them on my Mac Book Pro.

Here is a link to my blog site for a listing of articles that relate to this bug

Project Leader(s)

Andrew Grimo

Project Contributor(s)

Name(s) of people casually working on the project, or who have contributed significant help. Include links to personal pages within wiki

Looking for Help in:

Thunderbird Add-On: As I go into this project, I am wondering if there is someone that is interested in developing add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird, the latter being more pertinent here. As this bug gets solved, there is community interest in getting the behaviour of the actions extensible so that they can be modified after the fact.

Testing w/Glass Trackpads: Just as a precaution, testing the event tracking and behaviours off of the newest trackpads from Apple. These also have some additional multi-touch capabilities such as 4 finger swipes, but those haven't been requested from Thunderbird community at this time. The extra functionality may want to be documented and accommodated for, even if its being left along, it may be best to note in the code that it is being watched but ignored.

Performance Testing: I'm not sure at this stage, but its possible that performance testing may be required, especially if this code is in the flow of add-ons and could possibly impact performance levels across the board. I'm not sure at this stage.

Please contact me if you are interested at all in this by noting your name below on this page. I'll try and follow up quickly.


  • From Seneca College
    • ...

Project Details

This is the place for technical discussions, project specs, and other details as they unfold and become more understood.


Here are a listing of some other bugs that seem to relate to this one. They've been found through bug dependency links related to the bug for this project, and currently, I'm on the cc list for these bugs to better track there activities:

Project News

  • Currently, I'm just getting this project started. I'm in the midst of starting a blog for my progress which will be linked at the top of this page under the project description. The blog will be linked into [Seneca's Planet page]. Currently, this there is a bug filed on Bugzilla (noted above next to the project name) which lists all sorts of progress and discussion on this issue. Some discussion elements talk about what gestures to include and their behaviours, but also links to the source code implemented on Firefox and the spot where it should be included in Thunderbird.
  • My discussions have begun with Bryan W Clark (:clarkbw) who has suggested first steps which include getting 3-finger scroll functioning with the behavior to include scrolling up goes to the top of a message or thread/message list, and scrolling down goes to the bottom of that message or list. From there, other implementations can be developed.

I'm very excited to have posted my first publicly reviewable patch.

    • It implements 4 swipe gesture events
      • 3-finger swipe up: scrolls immediately to the top of the email message
      • 3-finger swipe down: scrolls immediately to the bottom of the email message
      • 3-finger swipe left: move to the previous message in the message thread
      • 3-finger swipe right: moves to the next message in the message thread
    • these actions were developed first as they were the ones defined in the bug as the starting point.
    • there was some butchering of the gGestureSupport object, particularly the _doAction property.
    • this release has also been announced on my blog at this link.
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