Easy Gestures Extension for Firefox

Easy Gestures is in my opinion one of the best Firefox extensions comparable to great extensions such as Greasemonkey or Adblock Plus. The Easy Gestures extension gives you access to commands that can be performed with mouse gestures, to be more precise with a simple mouse click and click on the desired action. Almost everything can be customized.

It is for instance possible to define the mouse button that opens the primary and secondary menu, the amount of actions that are shown (8 or 10), the opacity of the menu and of course the type of actions that are performed. Instead of using the default actions that are shown in the screenshot below you could edit the actions to make them suit your needs.

You can basically add any action that can also be added to a Firefox toolbar: Save Pages or Images, Open Urls, load scripts, use queries, zoom in and out and much more. Another important feature are the contextual menus that change the gestures when hovering above a link or image for example.

Everything can be customized which is really incredible. You can even start external programs with the extension!

Update: Easy Gestures is no longer available for the most recent versions of the Firefox web browser. There is however an alternative available that you can make use of instead.

Fire Gestures is probably the most popular mouse gestures extension for Firefox currently. It works in a different way -- by drawing symbols on the screen -- but provides nearly the same functionality as Easy Gestures.

The add-on is not limited to mouse gestures only, as you can combine them with other actions, such as keys that you hold down or the mouse wheel so that you have more choice in this regard.

Experienced users may create their own scripts and mappings, which they can then use to run select actions in the browser by drawing gestures on the screen.

Main Options

1. How mouse gestures are triggered: left, middle or right mouse button plus optionally Alt-key.
2. The color and size of the gesture.
3. Timeouts and status information.

Mapping

1. Displays all available gestures and lets you map them in a different fashion. For example, to go back you draw an L shaped symbol on the screen.
2. You can add, edit and clear scripts here.

Advanced

1. Enable wheel gestures, rocker gestures or keypress gestures

Verdict

Fire Gestures is a great extension for Firefox that can speed things up for you significantly. It works extremely well, the painting on the screen is intuitive and simply works whenever you need to make use of it.

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