Tempus Fugit

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:

1. go to about:config (i.e. type it in FireFox’ address field)
2. set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
3. set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false
4. play around with the mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines and mousewheel.withnokey.numlines values until you’re satisfied with the scrolling speed

iScroll2