Scrolling Up in Firefox makes it go Back
 

Before I say anything I should point out that I only just installed Mandrake 10.0 yesterday and I don't really know what I'm doing. Before that it was Windowsmania.

Okay, so I got Firefox installed, java is working, and the net in general has been just peachy. Mozilla and Konqueror both came with Mandrake but I much prefer Firefox, and besides... it took be bloody forever to get java working on it, so I want to keep it.

HOWEVER, it does have a problem which Mandrake and Konqueror do not, which is that every time I scroll up on my mouse's scroll wheel, Firefox will go Back to the last page I was on. If I do it again it'll take one step forward, so scrolling up means switching rapidly between the page I'm on and the page I was at last.

Not being able to scroll up in this way is quite frustrating, as you can imagine. I love scrolling up. At least a quarter of the scrolling I do is up. It's very important to me. As is Firefox. Can anyone help me with this? I've searched around but haven't been able to find anything that deals exactly with this problem.

It's just the standard Microsoft Optical Mouse that came with my computer. It works absolutely perfectly in every other application - only Firefox has this bizarre problem. Before you ask, I have the very latest version of Firefox, and aside from this tedious error it works perfectly. So yes... could somebody please explain what to do, keeping in mind that until just yesterday I was a frequent Windows XP user?

hmmm thats pretty weird, all i can think of is checking your extensions, maybe there an extension installed that allows you to do that, check tools->extensions

on your mouse, are you pushing the center button? i have noticed that if you push the button and try to scroll it does try to move you back. you have to actually roll the mouse button or drag the scroll bar. i havent really thought about this as a problem but i can see how it might get frusterating.

Nah, I'm not pushing it when I scroll, and I don't have any extensions installed yet.

Have you checked the preferences under "Mouse Wheel"?

Mine does the same thing... sometimes if I am schrolling up or down my middle button is just sensitive enough that it jumps me back a page or two...

I think you can disable by selecting "default" under Edit >> Preferenced >> Advanced >> Mouse Wheel. Change "Alt" to scroll and not back through history.

KC

When I go to Edit>Preferences>Advanced there is nothing about mouse wheels nor mice. The only available sections are Accessibility, Browsing, Tabbed Browsing, Software Update, Security, Certificates and Validation. None of these contain any options to do with the mouse wheel, nor does any other section in Preferences that I can see.

Uhh... I tried installing the ad-filled version of Opera and it did the exact same thing.

Does that change things?

Check out your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf on my machine), look for the entry for your mouse. Make sure that the following lines appear as they are here:

Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

I know my touchpad includes a horizontal scroll.. when I use it, Firefox goes forward/back. I'm assuming your computer thinks your scrollwheel is horizontal.

Also, if the above doesn't work, tell it your mouse has 7 buttons (which is probably doesn't,) and the ZAxisMapping is "6 7" (or maybe "7 6".... hmm, don't remember too well.) Point being, some mice use slightly different scroll protocol and need some tweaking to use the default mouse driver.

In any case, good luck with the whole thing!

Hmm... there wasn't a xorg.conf, but there is XF86Config-4. There was no Option "Buttons" bit in that file, though I tried both your other suggestions with the ZAxisMapping bit and neither of them seemed to have any effect, neither good nor bad.

This is what the mouse section of that file originally said, if it helps...

Might be a rather dumb question, but did you restart the X-server when you made changes? XF and xorg don't automagically re-parse the config files unless you restart. Try changing the ZAxisMapping to "4 5", then hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, which will either just restart your session or have you login again. Either way, your config will be re-parsed, and see if it makes a difference

Make a backup of your original config file, just in case, so you can restore it from the console if you break the gui... shouldn't be an issue though where you're only messing with the mouse.

Trust me - when you're dealing with me, no question is too dumb.

I didn't think to restart the X server, actually, which is kind of embarassing because I would have done that even if I were using Windows and something like this happened. So I tried it again, and bingo. Firefox has never been happier. Thanks for spelling it out - I no longer have to browse with Konqueror, which is a new kind of awesome.

...

Damn it. I just remembered, there was another reason I stopped using Firefox. Whenever I tried to organize my bookmarks, I'd like try to drag them to the order I wanted them in, but no matter what they'd just re-organize themselves randomly. But, I guess that's a problem for another thread.

lol, glad I could help you out. As for the bookmark thing, since I'm already here.... try Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, then View > Unsorted

Also maybe important, are the bookmarks "randomly" re-organized, or do they organize to the same locations every time (Firefox has a feature where it sorts bookmarks by date created, date visited, date modified, etc. if you want it to.)

If that doesn't fix it, I'm at a complete loss, and you probably *should* start another post.

Again, good luck!

Nope, that took care of it alright. It was going Sorted by Description, but I'd tried adding alphabetical descriptions and it didn't seem to make a difference. Ditto for Sorted by Name. But Unsorted it's fine, and I prefer to manually sort them anyway. Excellent. Now I have no problems with Firefox at all. Thanks again.

This bug has been plaguing me for quite some time. I've even had it happen with the touchpad as well as the mouse, and even while dragging the scrollbar up itself.

I'm running Fedora 16x64bit on a Toshiba Satellite model L750C.

This is really annoying.