How can I get Firefox to recognize multitouch gestures on a touch screen?

Multitouch seems to be working fine on Chromium out of the box, but not on Firefox. On Chromium, dragging a finger up or down the screen scrolls the screen as expected, but on Firefox, that gesture seems to be highlighting text. How can I get Firefox to play nice with multitouch gestures?

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 on a Lenovo Yoga 2 11" convertible laptop.

Edit: I read the page here which says that touch capability is present but disabled in FF. But enabling them and restarting doesn't seem to have any effect--dragging one's finger across the screen still only selects text.

Solution 1:

On Xubuntu 16.04 with Firefox 50, I got it working by enabling e10s and setting the env-var MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1. In detail:

1. Enable e10s/Multiprocess. If you're running Firefox 57 or higher, it should be enabled already. Otherwise, you may have to disable a bunch of addons, and possibly force enable it.

   • Use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ to check which addons are incompatible with e10s, although simply having only-marked-as-compatible addons is not enough in FF50 to get e10s switched on, you may have to force-enable it anyway (in FF50, only certain whitelisted addons are allowed with e10s by default – later versions will enable e10s as long as all addons are compatible).
   • You can check in about:support if Multiprocess is on. If you need to force-enable, just open about:config, right-click and enter a new boolean value with the name browser.tabs.remote.force-enable; then restart FF and check about:support again.

2. Exit FF, and start it from the command-line with MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 /usr/bin/firefox.

Now you can test https://www.paulirish.com/demo/multi and scroll with one finger.

Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1091627

Solution 2:

Firefox doesn't yet support multitouch on X11/Linux. At present, work is underway on upgrading from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 which I believe has landed in Nightly and Aurora/Developer Edition. There's a bug tracking the GTK upgrade as well as a bug for touch event support. The overall bug for multitouch support on Linux appears to be 711711 which depends on the bugs mentioned above.

Solution 3:

"Grab and drag" extension for Firefox did the trick for me, allowing at least for scrolling without selecting text. Gestures, however, do not seem to work.