Firefox gets accelerometer support
Posted by Percy Cabello on August 24th, 2009 • Tags:
ShareThis

Mozilla’s Doug Turner announced that support for accelerometers has landed to Firefox’s main development repository, the trunk.

For those unfamiliar, an acceloremeter is a cool little device that comes in several consumer devices including the MacBook Pro, iPhones, and other cell phones that tell the operating system the current device orientation and movement enabling some interesting applications, particularly in gaming: imagine a bowling or racing web app where you drive by moving your mobile device.

Only the MacBook Pro is supported right now but HTC and Samsung mobile devices running Windows Mobile should follow soon (in Fennec). Other OSs could follow as supporting other operating systems is pretty easy, according to Doug’s post.

Before you go buy a MacBook Pro, note that support has been added to the trunk, so it is not sure it will get shipped with Firefox 3.6 (aka Namoroka) targeted for later this year.

Comments
Juergen said on August 24, 2009, 3:15 am:

Sounds kinda useless. I’m not going to swing my laptop around to go back a page.

Reply

Dion Phaneuf is a prick said on August 25, 2009, 9:31 am:

Would be nice if a version was developed for Blackberry… Storm (and upcoming Storm 2) both have accelerometers.

Reply

ArchaicHonor said on August 26, 2009, 7:13 pm:

Thinkpads have accelerometers as well. They’ve had then for far longer than macs have ever had. They were just marketed as functional things to protect the hard drives. Marketing goes a long way in ignoring facts.

Reply

leandro said on August 29, 2009, 9:33 pm:

hi percy,
when firefox 3.6b1 is released, how about posting about the news coming to the next version? right now we only know speed improvements…
thanks
leandro

Reply

[...] available is accelerometer support which allows web applications know the current mobile device orientation to react [...]