Grab And Drag Just Like The iPad

How cool would it be to scroll your Firefox browser pages just like how you use an iPad? Here's a very useful plug in that allows you to do just that and more.

I have been looking for this functionality in Firefox for some time now and finally found a solution that is acceptable.

There's two features I was seeking:

1. The ability to grab and drag just like Adobe Reader's pan hand
2. The ability to flick up and down and have the page animate just like iPad

To get a sense of what I am talking about, watch the video below:

Grab and Drag

This feature makes navigation easier. Since I have a widescreen monitor, moving the mouse all the way over to the right side to scroll a web page is too much of a hassle. If you ever used Adobe Acrobat Reader you'd know that there used to be a hand panning feature available in the older versions. The great thing about this is that I could left click with my mouse (I have a roller ball mouse) and move the ball up and down clicking within an area of the page.

With Grab and Drag, I now can click once to enable the grab and drop hand pan mode to move the page up and down without using the scroll bar. If I click twice on the page, I can enable text mode where I can select, copy and paste text as usual.

Flick the Page

If you ever used the iPad or iPhone, you can place your finger on the tablet and flick it in different directions.

The Grab and Drag add on lets you accomplish the same thing. This is very useful for those web pages that have a lot of information on it. By flicking, you can now get to your information more quickly. An example would be scrolling through a long list of information like the Penn State book page as shown above.

Summary

The Grab and Drag add on for Firefox allows you to simulate the page movement of an iPhone/iPad. Additionally, it makes it easy to scroll web pages, especially for those who have roller ball mouses.

About Kerry Kobashi

Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.