Horizontal mouse wheel scrolling broken

Bug #14280 reported by Marius Gedminas
14
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
firefox (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Wishlist
Daniel Stone

Bug Description

I have a T42 laptop with a touchpad. When I remove the

  Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"

line from my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I can use the bottom of the touchpad as a
horizontal mouse wheel. (As far as I understand, that line was added to
xorg.conf precisely to avoid this Firefox bug. It seems somewhat backwards to
me. On second thought, I agree with that decision -- it is better to release
hoary with the bug hidden, if there's no time to fix it properly.)

Horizontal scrolling works fine in applications such as The GIMP or just random
generic Gtk+ programs that use a GtkTreeView.

Horizontal scrolling does not work work in Firefox -- it goes forwards/backwards
in history instead. This is an upstream bug
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231718 and there's a patch that's
been reviewed and only waits to be committed, if I understand it correctly.

This is also Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=231155

Then there's another problem: when I go to about:config and change
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0, horizontal scrolling works, but
the direction is reversed. It is easy to duplicate: enable horizontal
scrolling, find a large image, open it in The GIMP and Firefox, then try
scrolling. GIMP and Firefox scroll in different directions. GIMP is right,
Firefox is wrong. I haven't seen a bug report for this in bugzilla.mozilla.org
nor in bugs.debian.org yet.

Revision history for this message
Daniel Stone (daniels) wrote :

I'll claim this one since it's really on xserver-xorg, and since I added that.

The problem is not Firefox behaviour, but user expectations. People simply
don't expect horizontal scrolling to work on touchpads, cool as it is (I had
multi-finger taps, corner taps, circular, horizontal and vertical scrolling
enabled on my touchpad). It is disabled for that reason -- vertical scrolling
is hard enough to grok, but horizontal scrolling being on by default freaks
people out.

Revision history for this message
Marius Gedminas (mgedmin) wrote :

I have no objections to xorg.conf disabling horizontal scrolling on touchpads by
default. This bug is still present if you have a real mouse with two wheels,
and it has nothing to do with xserver-xorg. I apologize for causing confusion
by my mention of the changes I did to xorg.conf.

I filed this as a Firefox bug, because it mishandles horizontal scroll events in
two ways:

  1. Firefox binds scrolling events to history prev/next instead of scrolling
left/right.
  2. Firefox reverses the scroll direction when configured to use the wheel for
scrolling.

Revision history for this message
Thom May (thombot) wrote :

> 1. Firefox binds scrolling events to history prev/next instead of scrolling
> left/right.

Daniel tells me - and the patch in mozilla backs this up - that X can't tell the
difference between horizontal scrolling and buttons 6 and 7 being clicked. Thus,
were we to resolve this bug as you desire, we'd break all the people that use
those mouse buttons.

> 2. Firefox reverses the scroll direction when configured to use the wheel for
> scrolling.

Agree this is a bug, but because of the former point, it's very low priority.

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Nickurak (nickurak) wrote :

Unless I'm mistaken, newer mouse drivers explictly reserve buttons 4, 5, 6, and 7 for scrolling functions, so we should be able to safely assume that they do what we expect. (I don't actually own a mouse with more that 3 buttons + a wheel, but that don't have a horizontal scroll, so I can't test this)

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