I was having 2 very annoying problems with my touchpad on my laptop, and after reviewing multiple threads in this forum and on fedoraforum.org, here are the solutions that worked for me. Maybe someone should make this sticky (and possibly add to it if I left something out), because many other people apparently have the same problems.

Problem # 1 - touchpad tapping bothersome
as root, go to /etc/x11/xorg.conf and add these lines at the bottom of the synaptics input device section:
Option "TapButton0" "0"
Option "TapButton1" "0"
Option "TapButton2" "0"

Problem # 2 - going forward and backward in firefox when you press on the touchpad and push left or right:
in your browser, go to about:config in the address bar. Scroll down to browser.back_action, right click on it,
click on modify, and change setting from 1 to 0.

Addition to problem 2 - this worked pretty well for me, but I also found that my touchpad area was too small, so at the bottom of the touchpad, I still had the back and forward actions happening. I also realized that the right edge of the touchpad wasn't over far enough, so vertical scrolling would occur before the line that divided the touchpad with the up/down arrows where this was supposed to happen. I had to do a little bit of experimenting to figure out exactly where the edges were (yours may be different), but the following lines (in the same section as above) fixed the problem:
Option "RightEdge" "5750"
Option "BottomEdge" "5000"

Hope that saves some people a little bit of aggravation. And again, I think this should be made sticky.

Also, if you're using the Synaptics touchpad driver, there are quite a few more options you can set, the manpage has more info (man synaptics).

yo mods make this sticky i think its VERY helpful

edit: damn it not even this worked....