Mobile/Projects/Gestures

Questions

• what do the other browsers support in terms of gestures (how many, as an add-on or bundled, customized or standardized)
• what are the actual gestures for the listed gestures they support
• what does Android's gesture engine look like / how would we integrate it (ie what can it DO for us)
• how many 'small' screen touchpoints are there and where do they get shipped to? I have heard India takes a TON of them, and am assuming other developing markets as well
• any market data about the use of gestures, geographies and/or demographics?
• What do users want to do quickly that they can't right now?

Recommendation

• what would be the top 5 (or so - could be one more or less) gestures
• best served as an add-on or in-product (may be down to apk size, where it could fit in terms of menu on/off)

--

• Back / Forward
  • Swipe from left or right edge of screen
    • Bug 755123 - Investigate and implement swipe gestures for browser navigation
  • Reveal previous page "underneath" current page. Safari on iOS7 handles this nicely.
• Tab switching
  • Swipe up or down on tab counter icon
    • Bug 909427 - Allow dragging from the tab indicator to a tab to switch tabs
  • Two finger swipe in page content area
    • Bug 708765 - Add two finger scroll to pan as a percentage of the page
• Open tab tray
  • Swipe down from title bar
    • Bug 909434 - Allow dragging the urlbar to open the tabs tray

Justification

• User value in optimizing for touch UI and making using our browser an increasingly natural-feeling part of users' devices. This supports our marketshare, pre-install potential, and tablet optimization goals.

Research

• http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/gestures.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10675359/touchscreen-gestures-list-and-names

Other notes

Richard's notes about Coast:

• Swipe vs tap on home screen doesn't work well. Took three tries to tap Reddit.
• No feedback on loading speed. Sluggish.
• Minimal feedback. In the seven tries tapping on the link I wanted, it registered a click on the item above. I didn't know until that page loaded. You do get a grey outline when you successfully tap a link, but not when you fail. *Something* is different versus other browsers...
• Swipe-for-back kinda collides with pinch-to-zoom-out if you have a light touch. This is really annoying.
• It covers the previous page with pinstripes when loading 'back'. It's really annoying. In fact, the whole browsing experience feels like a clunky browser trying to be smooth.
• imgur captures swipes! That sucks a lot when your only controls are swipes. You can only 'escape' by accidentally opening the "Back stack" view. I still don't know how this works.
• You can view URLs, safety, info, etc by swiping down from a page in the "Back stack".
• Coast really suffers from lack of intents.