An intern at the Mozilla Foundation has demonstrated a glimpse of the future – a multitouch interface for Firefox. The video (below) looks fantastic.

As anyone who has used an iPhone will tell you, multitouch interfaces make controlling applications a joy. Scaling images, drawing pictures, gaming, selecting text – it’s all much easier when you can use multiple fingers at the same time.

With an Apple Tablet still rumoured to be arriving soon, it’s likely that we’ll see an explosion of touchscreen devices large and small over the next couple of years. The problem is, controling something as complex as a web browser (which may be running plugins and web applications on top of its regular browsing duties) via multitouch is an engineering challenge.

Now Brazilian Computer Science student Felipe Gomes, who recently completed an internship with Mozilla, has demonstrated some of the ways multitouch could be integrated with Firefox. It’s exciting stuff – especially the bit when he plays a two-player game of Pong against himself.

[vimeo width="600" height="300"]http://vimeo.com/6214945[/vimeo]

[via Cnet]