Of the myriad of new features included on newer Apple laptops, none has more unrealized potential than the multi-touch trackpads.

Some crafty developers over at Mozilla seem to be keen to this, and have included support for Apple’s new multi-touch keyboard in a new experimental version of Firefox dubbed Minefield. Minefield includes many enhancements that may (or may not) be part of the upcoming 3.1 release of Firefox. This new release takes advantage of the three-finger swipe, “the pinch”, and the two-finger rotate gestures built into OS X. The three-finger swipe act as a foward/back button, the two-finger rotate gesture switches between tabs, and the pinch move will make text on the screen larger or smaller (a la command and the +/- keys). In my few days using Minefield, the three-finger foward/back gesture has become second nature, and has completely replaced the mouse gestures I used to use. The two-fingered rotation to switch between tabs is somewhat less useful due to its high sensitivity which makes it harder than its worth to move quickly to the tab you want.

Minefield also includes a much improved Javascript engine that is supposedly 10% faster than Google’s Chrome browser, which is a feat unto itself. This will be good news for those who use web applications such as GMail or MobileMe.

For an “experimental” release, Minefield is quite stable. I didn’t experience any crashes, and the only problem I encountered was a strange bleed through of flash content on a background tab onto the foreground tab. I’m not sure if this problem is with Minefield, or a combination of Minefield and Flash 10 (which I recently installed). If you want to try out Minefield and are fond of your extensions, I would recommend installing the Nightly Tester Tools add-on, which will allow you to force compatibility for all your extensions.