Scrolling Horizontally with Firefox
posted at 10:52 am
on Aug. 30, 2005
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As far as I know, this is the world’s only horizontal scrolling blog. Because of that, you may be saying to yourself, “Hey, Trav, what’s up with the horizontal scrolling blog?”
Well, I could give you a long, artist’s tortured explanation of why horizontal scrolling makes sense for me—I think in long lines, I think in different directions, this is a metaphor for life—but really, that doesn’t matter so much as this important fact: it’s quite easy for you to scroll horizontally if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse.
Just hold down the SHIFT button and use the scroll wheel. You’ll zip left and right with the easy of a sparrow through a barn.
That is, unless you’re using Firefox. Firefox creators decided, in their infinite wisdom, to make left and right scrolling jump you ahead and back in your browser history. This was a dumb decision, made even more dumb when the Mighty Mouse from Apple came out. You see, using any trackball, you end up probably doing a little bit of left and right scrolling when you’re trying to scroll up and down. Trackball and Mighty Mouse users therefore go whizzing around cyberspace everytime they try to scroll a Web page.
To fix this, follow these steps, which I discovered on this site:
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
