“Owners of a multi-touch trackpad Macbook have been able to use gesture support in Firefox since the introduction of v3.1 beta in October. The recently released Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 added more gestures, like a twist gesture that lets users move through open tabs,” Christian Zibreg reports for TG Daily.

“However, Mozilla had to resort to reverse-engineering to enable gestures in Firefox on Macs as Apple has not been especially supportive in providing the necessary APIs to developers. While some claim that the company is still figuring out how to deploy multitouch across OS X, others are concerned that Apple quietly enhanced its own applications with gestures, like iPhoto and Safari, while shutting out potential rivals from taking advantage of the feature as well,” Zibreg reports.

“When Apple rolled out its Macbooks with multi-touch trackpads, it did not provide software developers access to the technology through public APIs. This behavior forces some developers to resort to reverse-engineering until Apple opens up multi-touch. One developer we talked to said that Apple’s multi-touch APIs are in their infancy and are likely change soon, concluding that at least some developers will wait until Apple locks-down the multi-touch user interface in OS X. It is unclear when that will actually be done,” Zibreg reports.

Full article here.