While several foot-controlled pointing devices have been explored as alternatives to conventional interfaces, we are interested in whether such devices can achieve higher performance with the addition of variable friction. Users wore our variable-friction prototype shoe on their right foot, which they slid on a low-friction surface to control a mouse cursor. Two interface modes were evaluated: constant (CF) and variable friction (VF), under the ISO 9241-9 standard for pointing device evaluation. For the variable-friction modality, target regions were high friction to provide sliding resistance cues. Our findings confirmed that variable-friction foot-controlled pointing can achieve throughput competitive with a range of hand-controlled devices. This suggests the potential for taking advantage of foot input for simple pointing tasks, in particular when the hands are overloaded. With respect to other foot-controlled pointing systems, our implementation offered improved performance and comparable error rates. In addition, the analysis provided further insight into the design of foot-controlled input devices.