Foxy Gestures

If you’re a long time Mozilla Firefox user and you value productivity a lot, then there’s a very good chance you heard about FireGestures, an add-on that provided Opera-like mouse gestures to execute various user scripts and fast commands.

Unfortunately, ever since Firefox’s big overhaul and the introduction of the Quantum engine, FireGestures is no longer supported. Thankfully, there’s a good alternative to the popular deprecated extension.

Meet Foxy Gestures, a useful extension that brings mouse gestures to Firefox. Since it’s heavily inspired by FireGestures, there’s no surprise that its functionality is pretty much the same (except integration with about:newtab, about:home, view-source, etc.).

Having said that, you can now use mouse gestures using the left, middle, or right mouse button, wheel gestures using a dedicated gesture button and the mouse wheel, and chord gestures (configurable chords supported as well).

Of course, one of the things that made FireGestures such a wonderful productivity tool was the fact that it allowed users to create custom gestures. Thankfully, the same can be said about Foxy Gestures.

You can implement new commands by creating scripts, you can pretty much configure all mouse gesture mappings and make use of default commands in the process. It may sound a bit of a handful, but the extension is remarkably easy to use. To get a basic tour of its features, just access the extension’s Options menu.

Start by taking a look at the General Settings section, the place where you can configure aspects such as the gesture timeout, the gesture style, the gesture trail width, and its color. The list of default gestures can be found in the Built-in Commands area. Other advanced gestures can be configured in the Other Gestures section.

However, one of the most interesting sections is the User Scripts tab. Here, you can record gestures and assign custom scripts. It’s worth noting that this area might require a bit of reading, as it may be a bit confusing at first. There are other Preferences to be explored in the next section, as well as the option to backup and restore the extension’s settings.

Taking everything into account, Foxy Gestures takes the so-called productivity banner right from where FireGestures left it. It offers pretty much the same functionality, it’s easy to install, and easy to use, even though first-time users will have to employ a bit of trial-and-error before they figure out everything it has to offer.