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Comment by jbernardo95 | Hacker News Reader

When is Firefox bringing smooth pinch to zoom to macOS ?

Are there a substantial number of macOS users using touchscreens?

EDIT: I don't know how I forgot about pinch to zoom via the trackpad. While my original question did start me down an interesting rabbit hole of touchscreen MacOS, I 100% agree that a lack of smooth pinch to zoom via the trackpad detracts from the overall user experience.

You Can pinch to zoom using the mousepad om MacBooks.

on windows laptops with precision touchpad too

You pinch to zoom on the trackpad, there’s no touchscreen

I think he's referring to pinch-to-zoom using the trackpad since there are no Mac computers with touchscreens at all.

No macOS machines ship with touchscreens, but trackpad gestures are used heavily throughout macOS. I find pinch zooming on the Mac to feel pretty natural.

I installed https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-touch-z..., it works well.

This feature is essential for mobile screens, and this is not meant to dismiss your concern, but what do you need pinch-to-zoom for on desktop? Everything is already huge and readable on desktop.

macOS doesn't only run on desktops; there are people using it all the way down to the 12" MacBook.

Sure, I’ve got a 12.3″ netbook (running Linux), and I don’t see any point in a variable zoom there either. Though I suppose it is 4:3 and hidpi.

Still, even at 768p you get a bespoke layout for your device, since this is literally the most common resolution still (seriously). The pinch-to-zoom on mobile is only useful for the very specific case of viewing unoptimized content (mostly desktop sites) in a comparatively smaller viewport. It’s not even useful on mobile if the website is optimized (sometimes for worse, but still).

It’s a nice to have, but hardly essential. But people are saying it prevents them from switching, so I am curious why.

I've always used Ctrl+/- as the ancients did. Does Cmd+ not work?

It’s a different type of zoom.

Last time I asked it seems that this is not a top priority for Firefox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15803281

What is your use case? Do you have poor vision? What's wrong with Cmd+?

Watch https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990

that and lack of bounce-scroll make firefox feel very clunky on mac, sadly

This is currently _the_ reason I don't use Firefox on macOS for anything other than testing. Oddly, it works on Windows reasonably well.

Edit: forgot to mention I had to tweak something to enable it on Win 10.

Edit 2: Why the downvotes?

Same here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com