firefox pages front/back on touchpad horizontal scroll

[Greg Michalec]

Firefox ships with mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action set to 2, which maps the horizontall scroll action to front/back page. This can be a real pain for touchpad users, when just moving your mouse around can cause pages to jump. I'm not sure whether the proper solution would be to set the firefox mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action value to 0, which would disable the horizontal scroll action (horizontal scroll + [alt|meta|ctrl|shift] remain enabled), or to disable the horizontal scroll feature for touchpads (i use the synaptics driver) by default.

[Ian Jackson (ijackson)]

Greg Michalec writes ("[Bug 30762] firefox pages front/back on touchpad horizontal scroll"):
> Firefox ships with mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action set to 2,
> which maps the horizontall scroll action to front/back page. This can be
> a real pain for touchpad users, when just moving your mouse around can
> cause pages to jump. I'm not sure whether the proper solution would be
> to set the firefox mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action value to 0,
> which would disable the horizontal scroll action (horizontal scroll +
> [alt|meta|ctrl|shift] remain enabled), or to disable the horizontal
> scroll feature for touchpads (i use the synaptics driver) by default.

This setting of mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action is default in
upstream and I'm reluctant to change it.

Why does horizontal mouse movement generate horizontal scroll events ?
This sounds like a problem with your touchpad driver.

Ian.

[Miguel Martinez (el-quark)]

So is it normal that firefox goes to previous pages if I move the mousewheel quickly?

I have changed "mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action" to 0 in about:config. I hope this will solve it.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

This problem looks related to the one described here:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/31827.

[Michael Favia (michaelfavia)]

Scrolling vertically quickly is triggering a horizontal scroll event Which is a valid bug (but currently misfiled inder firefox too).

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/31827

Horizontal scrolling in firefox triggering a page froward/back action is expected behavior. WONTFIX/NOTABUG here then?

[Michael Favia (michaelfavia)]

Additionally, Greg you can tighten up the area that is used for horizontal scrolling (in xorg conf) if you desire. However, the only application that it really bothers me in is firefox because of the enormity of the effect it has if accidentally triggered. So i just normally disable it in there (by mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action=0). -mf