I've got an irritating problem with Firefox. Perhaps it's actually a feature, but it's it really drives me nuts either way. The problem is that if I flick scroll up or down real fast, it wants to navigate through my history.

For example:
If I scroll down real fast with the scroll wheel, it acts the like I hit "back" one page on the toolbar. If I scroll up real fast with the scroll wheel, it acts like I hit "forward" one page on the toolbar. Hopefully it makes sense what I'm trying to say.

Some people may have this enabled, but don't run into a problem with it. It's one of those things that probably certain browsing habits are going to encounter while others aren't. For me, Firefox behaves in this manner by default. It may be one of those things that specific to the package for Firefox from my distro (I'm not sure). For reference, this is with Arch Linux 7.2's "mozilla-firefox 1.5.0.6-1" package. Which is Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.6 as far as Firefox's own versioning goes.

If you want to test what I'm talking about, try scrolling really fast up or down on your mouse scroll wheel. I don't know if this is a default behavior acrossed the board for different version and distros or not.

I can't find any settings that have an effect on this in Mozilla Firefox. Maybe someone else knows how to fix my problem, or knows the setting that controls this behavior.

Anyone know how to disable this behavior in Mozilla Firefox?

Right on!

I think I found the cause and fix of this. I changed the following in my xorg.conf.

It was originally:

zaxismapping "4 5 6 7"

I changed it to:

zaxismapping "4 5"

What it appears to be is that, at least in my case and perhaps in others, is that when you generate an xorg.conf in Xorg, it defaults to the former. In my case, I originally configured Xorg via the "xorgconfig" script.

I believe what is going on is that in most cases "6 7" is for scrolling horizontally (by default anyway). In my case, I have just a real standard scrollwheel that is only vertical. So I assume that horizontal scrolling is often mapped to back and forward in history for some web browsers by default (maybe most of them for all I know). I think what was going on is that when I flicked the scroll wheel fast enough X was enterpretting it as "6" and "7" for "zaxismapping" setting instead of confining it to "4 5" like it should in my case.

So if you're having this same problem, try changing that setting like I show to see if it takes care of it for you.

i have another similar yet diffrent problem.
i recently installed a new mouse with more buttons, in doing so i was hoping to have the extra buttons scripted to firefox only actions, ie. open new tab. but in doing so i have now lost the use of my scroll wheel. its realy anoying please assist

sometimes "page scroll" is useful

Yes, there is definitely some kind of bug here! I have Firefox-2.0. The mousewheel does very strange things, not always repeatable. When I load a page with some kind of video (flash) which I don't have the plugin for, scrolling over that area of the page sometimes closes the browser completely!


Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Eid Mubarrak to everyone.

See http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...6688&lsrc=osxh

Executive summary: In about:config, set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 1.

well, yeah... but keep in mind that when you *only* have a vertical scroll wheel then this should not be an issue... hence, what PingFloyd did was the proper fix, and the mousewheel.horizscroll thing you are suggesting would (in this case) be more of an ugly work-around (he would have had to sacrifice his vertical scroll in firefox because it was not properly configured in X.org)...

Gee, I must've been really tired when I posted that...

How do I get my wheel mouse to scroll by page instead of per line?

Tome2: Welcome to LQ, nice to see new members

I think you would be better served by creating a new thread for your question. Sure, we're discussing mozilla in this thread, so we might know something about it; but all the people who know more about mozilla than we do aren't going to see your question--something they are more likely to do if you post a new thread. Also, keeping one thread per issue is a custom around here, so you'll have fewer people frowning at you (meaning a larger fraction of those who read your question are willing to help).

I don't know the answer to your question, but it sounds like google could be helpful. If you've already tried google, let us know; in fact, every time you have a problem, let us know exactly what you've done to diagnose and/or solve it yourself. See also http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html.

I was having exactly the same problem as mentioned in the starting post. It didn't happen in my Ubuntu Edgy, but happened in my new Arch installation.
I think its sorted now by setting the key "mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action" in about:config to value 1 (instead of 2).

firefox does this in Windows 2000 too (mouse wheel scrolls through the history list instead of scrolling the page).

Good to see consistent behavior across platforms.

Edit: worse in 2.0.0.12

I had this same unwanted behavior, which is apparently particularly troublesome if you use a KVM (which I do). The recommendation from another forum worked wonderfully: unplug and replug the mouse to the KVM.

Hi, im new. So hi everyone.

I deactivated mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines in about:config and apparently fixed this behavior. Can someone confirm these?

I was having the same problem. Making the changes in this thread helped but I still have the problem. It seems to only happen when I scroll to the top of the web page.