Disable That Irritating AutoScroll Feature in Firefox
So you try to middle click on a link on a page and miss the link… then the round "Auto Scroll" icon shows up and suddenly the page is moving around and scrolling all by itself. It drives me crazy, so when it was mentioned in the latest Coding Horror article I figured I would write it up in case anybody else wants to disable it.
Note: You can't disable the same thing in Internet Explorer as far as I can tell. If anybody knows of a way, let me know.
Open up the Options dialog through Tools \ Options, click on the Advanced tab/button, and then uncheck the "Use autoscrolling" box.
The change should be immediate, no need to restart.
Note: This should work on Firefox 2 or 3.
The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 03/28/08 and tagged with: Firefox, Firefox & Internet
If you're using MS Intellipoint, you can redefine the function of the middle key (in my case, clicking the scroll wheel) to something other than Auto-scroll (in my case, Double-Click).
That's so simple, but yet somehow I never knew it was there…
I usually use Internet Explorer and it drives me crazy, but I might switch to Firefox now that I know I can disable it.
thanks!
This shows again: men don't read manuals.
Haven't found this option till your blogpost *happy*
Hi You can disable the same thing in Internet Explorer as well. Go to Control Panel, then Mouse, then to Activities tab. Make sure Turn On ClickLock is unchecked. Try This…….Cheers
Good tip! In addition to this, if you type about:config in Firefox's address bar and double-click the middlemouse.paste entry, the middle mouse button will paste in Firefox, like it does in the UNIX world.
@ Kum Sharma, This did not work for me ….. I haven't got that option, I am running vista 32BIT with a basic wired mouse.
ClickLock doesn't work that way, it's for selecting text or dragging things without having to hold down the mouse button.
If you have a wheel mouse, IE automatically enables autoscroll.
How did I not spot that! this has been irritating me for ages!
Very good. Though, any idea why whenever I middle-click on anywhere on a page Firefox attempts to open whatever text happens to be on the clipboard at that moment, and more often than not produces a 'This URL is invalid and cannot be loaded' message?
Do you know a similar thing for Opera?
I never realized how much I was annoyed until you told me how to fix it. I was in 'autoscroll by accident' denial.
Now I'm cured. Thanks.
Thanks for the tip mate. It is really annoying and should be disabled by default.
:O I love auto scroll! How could you guys want to take it away. It's so incredably useful!
I use autoscroll all the time.. in fact mine's been inadvertently disabled thanks to a plug-in, which I have now uninstalled for messing with my autoscroll settings.. been trying to figure out what was up with it but forgot there was a setting for it in options.. dohh
Thanks.
o/
Cheers mate ! ,
that was driving me fecking crazy , was about to buy a new mouse ! , so simple yet never thought to look .