This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

I'd love to see gestures incorporated as a native feature (all the add-ons are creepy). Any chance of this happening in the next couple of years?

more options

Nothing more to add. I used to use gestures and miss them. All the add-ons want a ridiculous amount of access granted, so I'm just doing without. It seems like it would be a real differentiating feature, and would love to see it natively implemented.

Nothing more to add. I used to use gestures and miss them. All the add-ons want a ridiculous amount of access granted, so I'm just doing without. It seems like it would be a real differentiating feature, and would love to see it natively implemented.

All Replies (1)

more options

Firstly, this is more of a feedback thread. If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues.

Secondly, on the topic of add-on permissions, the permissions often sound scarier than they actually are. While I'm not going to speak for all add-ons, most are not abusing the permissions.

The most misleading permission is the "Access your data for all websites" permission that a large bulk of the add-ons for Firefox require. It sounds sinister, but it's really not. I see that the Gesturefy add-on requires that.

In reality, it's just a blanket permission that an add-on developer needs to have in order to interact with websites. In Gesturefy's case, they are very open about why they need that permission, saying:

This is a key permission, because the complete gesture functionality is injected in every web page you visit (which means a part of the code is running in each tab). This is necessary, because with the new API there is no other way to track your mouse movement or draw anything on the screen. It's also needed to perform page specific commands like scroll down or up.

As an add-on developer with six years of experience, I've come across this issue a lot. Most recently, it was when I created a website blocker. I needed permission to all website data, not because I'm snooping on users, but because in order to actually be able to block a website from loading I needed to be able to control that website.

I know this really isn't on topic, but it's something that I see a lot of on these forums, so I try to clear it up when I can. The permissions sound very spooky, but they are, more often than not, there are a legitimate purpose.

Hope this helps.