Getting touchscreen events working with Firefox

I bought this laptop with a touchscreen and occasionally find myself using it while surfing websites. Now with Chrome that worked just fine but with Firefox it tends to select areas of text instead of scrolling. That sucks!

Fortunately it's quite fixable. You just have to modify the .desktop file (or launch from the command line) with an additional environmental option: env MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1

On most linux distributions, the .desktop file is in /usr/local/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications but you can also modify it globally in /usr/share/applications if you have root.

1vim ~/.local/share/applications/firefoxtouch.desktop

Then modify the Exec line so it looks like this instead:

Exec=env MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 /usr/bin/firefox %u

If you're creating an entry from scratch in your local share directory you may want to give it a different name like "Firefox Touch"

1[Desktop Entry]
2Name=Firefox Touch
3Comment=Browse the Web Touch
4Icon=firefox
5Exec=env MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 /usr/bin/firefox
6Terminal=false
7Type=Application
8Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
9StartupNotify=true

When you relaunch Firefox, you should have the ability to use your touchscreen in the same way Chrome uses it. If not, go back to your file and make sure you've modified ALL the entries.. sometimes the .desktop file has multiple ones for private browser, new window, etc. Hopefully Firefox makes this the default in the future but as of version 65, I'm still waiting.