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Mozilla has revealed it is working on a new set of touchscreen tools for the Firefox browser.

The software maker’s multitouch Firefox project is still in its infancy, but the goal is to eventually offer web developers a way to tap into a new multitouch support structure to create online games and alternative touch-based user interfaces for web apps in Firefox.

At the moment, there are no hard and fast plans regarding exactly when multitouch support, which would be accessible through new APIs, might land in Firefox. The current goal calls for the new tools to arrive in Firefox 3.6, which is due later this year.

Touchscreen interfaces are gaining in popularity industry-wide — phones, netbooks, even some desktop PCs are starting to offer touch-sensitive screens. Windows 7, just a couple of months away, will offer even greater support for touchscreen hardware. Of course, the touchscreens only work if the software you’re using understands the input it’s receiving. In some cases, the OS itself provides those multitouch hooks (like on the iPhone), but even then software needs to adapt and use the new inputs.

The result is a computing environment where some of the applications are touch-sensitive and others are not, and Mozilla doesn’t want Firefox to be left in the cold in that regard.

A browser that can accept events from a touchscreen would give web developers a whole new set of of events to work with. Instead of just “onclick” and or other mouse events, multitouch software would be able to understand events like “ontouch,” “ontap” or something similar. Once those events are made available though, for developers, the sky’s the limit.

These enhancements might mean more work for developers, but they also open up some very cool possibilities for new web apps and games. Check of the video below from Mozilla intern Felipe Gomes that shows off a demo of some prototyped multitouch support for Firefox in Windows 7.

Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the project is that web developers will be able to detect multitouch devices through CSS media queries and serve entirely different stylesheets geared at multitouch interfaces. Think @screen, @print and @touch stylesheets.

Mozilla also recently announced that it was adding support for orientation events to the development trunk for the Firefox browser. This would allow Firefox to accept input from accelerometers. Web apps would be able to manipulate the page layout based on which way the screen is turned by using a JavaScript API. Right now, the only non-phone hardware that has an accelerometer is the MacBook Pro, but more laptops should have them soon.

See Also:

• Mozilla Shows What’s to Come in Firefox 3.6 Alpha Release
• Mozilla Mulls Design Makeover for Firefox 3.7
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5