Use Magic Mouse Swipe to Switch Tabs in Firefox

I picked up my Apple Magic Mouse a couple weeks ago, and I am totally in love with it. However, most of the programs I regularly use for web development don’t take advantage of the two-finger swipe gesture. Luckily, Firefox includes support for gestures that let me set up my mouse to switch tabs with the left/right swipe!

How to Do It

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Type “about:config” into the address bar. After a warning about voiding your warranty (on a free open source product), screwing up your browser, and/or creating a wrinkle in the space/time continuum, this will bring up the Firefox configuration options.
  3. Use the filter box to search for “gesture.swipe” and you should see the results below.
  4. Double-click on the values for “browser.gesture.swipe.left” and “browser.gesture.swipe.right” and change them to “Browser:PrevTab” and “Browser:NextTab” respectively.
  5. Resume browsing as usual and enjoy your new tab-swiping functionality!

Firefox Settings

MUCH better than the default back/forward swipe functionality!

UPDATE (12/14/09): If you are interested in doing much more with your Mighty Mouse than this, you might want to check out BetterTouchTool, a utility for adjusting all sorts of gestures for both the MacBook touch pad and the Mighty Mouse (they have good taste in WP theme also)!