1783534 - Back/Forward gesture interferes with zoom and horizontal scrolling

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Panning and Zooming, defect)

Description

[Simonas Kazlauskas [:nagisa/:simukis]]

I recently updated from 103.0a1 to 105.0a1 (couldn’t do so earlier due to a crashing bugs), and now I’m seeing a forward/back navigation two-finger gestures being enabled on Linux.

They wouldn’t be a problem otherwise, but they seem to share the similar two-finger operation with horizontal scrolling and two finger “reverse-pinch” gesture and gets unintentionally triggered all the time (which is how I discovered it!). Especially notable because it sometime happens during an on-going zoom operation already!

This is a significant regression in experience for me, as I use zoom and horizontal scrolling extensively. Some additional testing for this functionality may be warranted on linux.

This may have been a change in some other system component not necessarily firefox proper though. Maybe liblinput?

Comment 1

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Yeah, I've seen similar issues and I've disabled the gesture in some FF profiles. But this is a Firefox frontend issue.

Comment 2

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

The swipe-to-navigate gesture can be disabled in about:config by setting the pref widget.disable-swipe-tracker to true.

Regarding the issue of unintentional triggering, it would be helpful if you could provide some additional information to help us reproduce the issue:

• Hardware/software info (laptop model, Linux distro and version, desktop environment version, whether you're using Wayland or X11)
• Some example websites where the issue occurs, especially in the case of horizontal scrolling. The intention is for horizontal scrolling to take precedence over the swipe gesture, such that the swipe gesture is only activated on pages which are not horizontally scrollable, or where you're already scrolled to the relevant edge such that there's no room to scroll further in that direction. Bugs in detecting this might be specific to the page structure.
• Some additional description of the shape of the gesture you're performing when the unintentional activation happens

Comment 3

[Simonas Kazlauskas [:nagisa/:simukis]]

The swipe-to-navigate gesture can be disabled in about:config by setting the pref widget.disable-swipe-tracker to true.

I am aware of this and been using the setting ever since I filed this bug. That also unfortunately means I haven’t been verifying if this bug is still valid, nor do I remember all that well in what cases I would hit this issue. I know that’s not particularly useful and it is fine if you close this off as inactionable, I guess.

Hardware/software info (laptop model, Linux distro and version, desktop environment version, whether you're using Wayland or X11)

Laptop: Huawei EUL-WX9
Distro: NixOS
Compositor: Sway (firefox is running as a wayland client)

Some example websites where the issue occurs, especially in the case of horizontal scrolling. The intention is for horizontal scrolling to take precedence over the swipe gesture, such that the swipe gesture is only activated on pages which are not horizontally scrollable, or where you're already scrolled to the relevant edge such that there's no room to scroll further in that direction. Bugs in detecting this might be specific to the page structure.

I remember this happening consistently on all websites, mostly because if I zoomed in, I would get a horizontally scrollable page (and I would need to utilize this extensively to look around the page.) Then if I scrolled too far to the left, I would also get navigated to the previous page. Another example would be on GitHub’s code blocks which if too long would become scrollable horizontally, and if I scrolled too far past the end I would also invoke the navigation gesture.

Though again, I have had this gesture disabled for so long at this point I don’t know if this has been improved since (especially because I was using Nightly versions of Firefox at that time.) Testing with the current firefox I’m noticing that Firefox no longer attempts to interpret the same gesture as multiple actions (i.e. if you start scrolling, it will not attempt to navigate as part of that same gesture, etc.)

Some additional description of the shape of the gesture you're performing when the unintentional activation happens

Sorry, can’t remember. Given that I’m no longer able to reproduce it myself after a quick test, I’ll just mark this as resolved.