Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Firefox Mouse Wheel Reverse

In Firefox, I use 'ctrl mousewheel scroll' to enlarge the text size of some webpages quickly if the text is too small to read comfortably, however, I've always found that I intuitively scroll the wrong direction. In other words, when I want to enlarge the text size of a web page, I would press the control button and spin my mouse scroll wheel down. I know it sounds backwards to what should be intuitive - but it seems the most natural to me. This by default makes the text smaller... so I then have to scroll up to make it back to its' original size, then again to enlarge.

So today, after scrolling the wrong way on three different occasions I decided to snoop around about:config for any possible fixes. Turns out the fix was easy.


  1. Enter about:config in the address bar.


  2. Press OK to move pass the warning (if you are using Firefox 3b1 anyway)


  3. In the filter bar enter: mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines


  4. You should see one entry with the value of '1'. Change it by double clicking it and entering '-1'.





I love fixes that are obvious, easy to find and intuitive.

6 comments:

  1. Interesting; the Windows version does it "your way" by default, though the setting is '1' as well. That seems odd and mildly disturbing to me.

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  2. hmmm... I wonder if this is just a case of interpreting 'scroll up' and 'scroll down' differently between you and me. To me, 'scroll down' is me pulling the wheel towards me - 'scroll up' is pushing the wheel up... same for you?

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  3. Awesome!
    I just upgraded to fx3 and it was super counter intuitive. Thanks for the quick tip.

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  4. Cool .. for me i see it the same .. it is like when i scroll the wheel toward me .. its like i want to grab the text toward me as well .. so what make sense to me is making scroll down for Enlarging the text ..

    thanks for the Tip =)

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  5. Thanks for the tip! I've switched to FF3 and it seems to have the scrolling exactly the opposite from FF2 -- this helped to fix it!

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