Sometimes it's nice not to have to search for the little button and press it that opens the next mail or goes to the next picture, but simply do a quick gesture. GMail actually has a labs setting for that.

I use gestures for navigation all the time, as a firefox plugin, so i don't have to press the back arrow, but simply do a quick gesture. It's much faster, for me anyways.

"Sometimes it's nice not to have to search for the little button and press it that opens the next mail or goes to the next picture"

Beats having to go look at the documentation to determine what gesture corresponds to the action you want to accomplish. Also, with gestures it seems to me there aren't very many intuitive gesture/action matches... I can only think of:

  left = go back
  right = go forward
  circle = reload
  X = delete
  left, right, up, down = pan in that direction

There's certainly others but not a lot I think.

Gestures: [Press Ctrl or Right-mouse] + Click + Drag

Old style navigation: Locate mouse cursor + Locate 16x16 px target icon + move your mouse across a 1600px desktop to the tiny icon + Click

I use StrokeIt ( http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/ ) for regular Windows apps and Firefox Mouse Gestures Redox for browsing and I cannot live without either. I close app windows and browser tabs by a single slash across the screen and it is so much more efficient than going to the top-right corner of every window or locating the tiny close-tab icon. Keyboards are always faster but 90% of the time, my hand is on the mouse anyway.

The gestures work because they can perform the standardized function regardless of the UI. I can configure a 'slash' to Ctrl+F4 for Photoshop, Alt+F4 for default Windows Apps, and Ctrl+W for my text-editor. I don't think each website having its own set of gestures that do different things will be as helpful in this regard so yeah, this library isn't as useful in its current incarnation. But everyone knows what came out of being able to drag an image inside of a div using Javascript (hint: maps) so who knows what novel application this concept can help power.

For a web page, you're exactly right, but imagine a functional app that you use every day.

If you've done any amount of user research, you know that thigh-speed users hate using the keyboard and mouse at the same time. For most instances keyboard is king, but for a few, using a mouse exclusively is a great benefit...browsing pictures, for example.

(Just FYI I clicked to turn them on and didn't need to use Ctrl)

"thigh-speed" users? I've dealt with some unusual users, but this sounds like it could be interesting... :)

lol, gotta love those fat fingers of mine. :-)

You could also map your mouse thumb button to Ctrl.