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by lightwords 2757 days ago
Pinch to zoom is also non-existent so Firefox becomes useless for a many adults/elderly with poor eye-sight or even just many other users who like to browse and zoom on text/pictures etc. It's so frustrating that this feature is not available in Firefox when you are promoting it. The absence of this feature in my small survey is the main reason people quit using Firefox.
1 comments

I'm honestly a bit confused. This is the second comment I've seen regarding the lack of this feature. It's not one I ever use purposefully, so maybe I just don't understand what's missing. But, with Firefox on my Samsung Galaxy, I can zoom in and out of text and photos by pinching, with no issues at all. Was it a long time ago when you last tried it perhaps?
Latest version on MacOS It's one of the primary gestures of MacOS, and is in heavy use with casual users. It's f.x the primary method of reading material on websites that my parents use.
(The trackpad gesture, is what you're getting at)
I think they mean desktop Firefox on a touchscreen laptop, rather than mobile Firefox. Personally, I can't imagine trying to pinch-zoom on a desktop, but maybe I'm just old.
They're talking about a gesture that's specific to the Macbook trackpad; namely, the implementation you see in Safari, which is not the typical browser 'zoom' function that increases the size of elements and reflows the page, but rather zooms in to show you a subset of the DOM canvas as rendered, like mobile browsers do. It is definitely a handy feature but to characterize it as a missing 'standard' functionality I don't think is fair. No desktop browser had this functionality until Safari ported it over from the mobile version a few releases back as I recall, though Chrome has since copied it.
On Microsoft Surface in tablet mode I often want to pinch zoom. It works but it's limited to the discrete zoom levels that you see with Ctrl+ and Ctrl- so you don't get the smooth zoom you get on Chrome. I still prefer FF for a variety of other reasons so to me it's just a nitpick.