One of the features of my new PowerBook I like the most is the two-fingered scrolling mechanism. Whereas you normally use one finger on the trackpad to move the mouse around, if you use two fingers and move them together, you get vertical and/or horizontal scolling. It’s so handy, I don’t even think about it anymore.
There is, however, one annoying side effect of this scrolling: Firefox for Mac OS X is set up so that “scroll left” and “scroll right” acts as “go back” and “go foward” in your browsing path. I primarily use Firefox for web development, especially CSS (which I can edit live… a huge timesave). I can’t tell you how annoying it is to have 15 minutes of CSS tweaking flushed down the drain with one inadvertant sideways scroll.
Thanks to this site (which provides a two-fingered PowerBook scroll driver for older model PowerBooks), I have the solution:
Finally, FireFox users should note that FireFox by default is set to interpret any horizontal scrolling as forward/back. In conjunction with iScroll2 (or other means of allowing horizontal scrolling), this can lead to unintentional jumping between pages. Fortunately, FireFox’ default behavior can be changed as follows:
- go to about:config (i.e. type it in FireFox’ address field)
- set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
- set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false
- play around with the mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines and mousewheel.withnokey.numlines values until you’re satisfied with the scrolling speed
Dang, man, you just solved my #2 gripe with Firefox on my Powerbook. Thanks a million!
(The #1 annoyance, by the way, is the fact that any time a new window is requested, the whole Firefox app itself freezes up for a good 20-45 seconds. I’ve no idea what causes it, but it’s the one thing keeping me from using Firefox exclusively on the Mac. YMMV.)
Glad to help, Doug. I’m still using Safari for my regular browsing, just using Firefox for web development. The startup issue you mention is a big part of that. It’s not quite 20-45 secondson my PowerBook (1.67GHz, 1GB RAM), but it may be 15-20. Safari can start up from scratch before Firefox (already running) can spawn a new window. Maybe this will be fixed in a later version. I really like Firefox, especially with Greasemonkey, so I hope it is fixed!
Speaking of flippin’ sweet Mac browsers, have you checked out Shiira? It’s based on the same KHTML core that Safari is, but it adds some nifty features, like Core Graphics-powered “page flip” animation between pages and a “Tab Expose” feature that lets you see all the tabs in your window similar to the way hitting F9/F10 reveals all apps/all windows of a single app.
Give Camino a try too…it’s been on the Mac longer, I don’t see why the Firefox developers just didn’t use that code. A lot of it was rewritten in Cocoa, so it’s hella fast. It also incorporates a lot of Safari’s features, too.
I’d use it as my primary browser, except it’s not made by Apple. 😛
I have been trying to figure out how to fix this problem for a few months now and I just found your site and it took me about two minutes to fix it. My friend has also been annoyed with it so I will tell him about your site. Thanks Alot.