How in the Tech

Supercharge your mousewheel scrolling in Firefox 3.6

By Adam Myers ⋅ January 27, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

It’s hard to remember the days when your browser lacked tab support. Firefox, while not the first, implemented tabs and brought the feature to the fore-front – now every browser supports that functionality. Tabbed browsing has become pivotal to the surfing experience. Of equal importance, the popularity of the mousewheel and it’s use in window scrolling is just as significant. Microsoft, again, while not the first, introduced the Intellimouse in the mid 90′s and was many’s first experience with the wheel. Here is a rhetorical challenge that I bet you cannot accomplish – use your browser for an hour without utilizing tabs or the mousewheel. It’s a losing proposition, I’m quite sure.

Having become accustomed to a few flicks of the mouse wheel sending pages of a document whizzing by I was interested to learn that Firefox 3.6 supports the same behavior. By default, and all releases previously, a single scroll jumps the web page up/down a bit; it can be a smooth transition but at the end, it’s still a one to one movement. That is, move the wheel once; the page move once, move the wheel 5 times quickly, the page moves quickly 5 times – but still just 5 equal jumps. There is no sense of acceleration like other applications have.

Buried in about:config lies a mouse wheel tweak that maps acceleration to the number of times you’ve flicked the mouse wheel.

1. In the address bar type about:config



2. Filter for mousewheel.acceleration



3. You’ll see two preferences returned: mousewheel.acceleration.start is the number of times you need to flick the mouse wheel before acceleration kicks in. mousewheel.acceleration.factor is the determinant to how much acceleration is applied
4. Change either preference by double clicking on them, it may take a few go arounds before you find a pairing you are comfortable with though.