Tech yourself before you wreck yourself

I got an Apple Magic Mouse recently and overall it’s quite nice. The momentum scrolling is an important evolution.

The momentum sometimes has side effects in apps that are not expecting it though. Firefox is one of these apps.

I tend to browse with many tabs open, and I like to switch between open tabs with control+tab and control+shift+tab (on mac).

The problem occurs when you flick your finger to scroll down a site and then immediately switch to another open tab with control+tab. By default, Firefox is set to “zoom” the site you’re on with control+mousewheel. Because of the momentum, Firefox still sees the mousewheel event when you press down command, and therefore starts zooming one or both of your tabs in catastrophic ways.

You can easily reset the zooming of a site by just hitting command-0 (zero), but it’s still annoying, and it happens more often than you would think.

Here’s how to disable the control+mousewheel zoom once and for all:

1. Open a new tab and enter about:config into the address bar.
2. Enter “mousewheel” in the filter textbox
3. Look for any mousewheel.withXXXXXkey.action that has a value of 3 (3=zoom)
4. Double click the 3 and change it to 0 (0=no action)

That’s it! No more inadvertent zooming. You can always set it back to default by right clicking the line you changed in about:config and choosing “reset.”

Don’t live with tiny annoyances, they add up.