An annoyance with the latest Firefox 3 Beta. The ctrl-scroll wheel (aka mousewheel) page text resize shortcut inexplicably reversed itself since the last version of Firefox I was using. That is, Ctrl-WheelDown now makes the text smaller, whereas before it made it larger.
In fairness to Mozilla, this change actually makes the behaviour more in line with guidelines and probably, if you were a brand new Firefox user, it’d be more intuitive too.
But for those of us who have grown accustomed to the old behaviour and don’t want to bother retraining muscle memory, here is the secret… go to Firefox’s about:config settings page (type about:config into the location bar) and find the “mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines” setting, and change it from positive one to negative one. That is, after the change, the relevant prefs should be:
mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action = 3
mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines = -1
Problem solved. More information at Mozilla bug #141476.
Damn, it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. I’ve always felt the “up equals down” system felt wrong.
20 May 2008 @ 4:18 am
THANKS , that was driving me crazy
06 June 2008 @ 2:36 am
Oh, and i dont think it is more intuitive the way they made it in FF3, the way i see it scrolling the wheel “down” seems to me like “pulling the page towrads me” thus making it “closer” a leat thats what my brain feels it like, so “pushing it away(scrolling up)” doesnt make sense to me making the font bigger.
06 June 2008 @ 2:41 am
THANK YOU! Irritating…
18 June 2008 @ 6:04 am
hey, you saved me a couple of days of annoyance! Yes, I could get used to the new standard in a week or so, but this would turn my initial reactions with FF3 much more negative than it should be.
so far, I’m loving it, and way better than the beta.
thanks a lot!
18 June 2008 @ 10:40 am
Thanks You! The first thing I noticed on FF3 was this and I went to the same setting except I only tried positive values! It is really more natural to move the wheel down then up when zooming IMHO.
18 June 2008 @ 11:22 am
Thanks for this. Firefox should not have changed the interface; I also agree that it is counterintuitive.
18 June 2008 @ 7:15 pm
I’ve always felt “down” is like zooming in, getting closer, whereas up is zooming out, flying away.
But I’ve also felt that the power-window controls in cars is also backwards; I never get it right on the first try.
And I also play first-person-shooters with the mouse reversed.
Maybe playing those flight simulators when I was young damaged my brain?
19 June 2008 @ 5:15 am
This is why I hate upgrading Firefox. My life is complete once again. Thank you.
19 June 2008 @ 8:09 am
Ohhh, no wait a minute… Unlike with Firefox 2.x, when I increase the font size on most websites, the column widths increase too and a page’s layout expands well beyond my browser width… rather than the old way where text would enlarge within a fixed column width.
Is there any way to go back to the old method?
19 June 2008 @ 8:12 am
AJ,
In View, Zoom, click View Text Only
And thanks for the mouse wheel trick. Annoyed me too!
20 June 2008 @ 5:48 am
Woohoo! I’m so happy that a search for ‘ firefox mouse wheel font size ‘ led me to this page. Like Mr. Shiny & New, the previous behaviour made much more sense to my brain.
Thank-you.
24 June 2008 @ 10:37 pm
The change was pretty logical, FF was probably the only application zooming in other direction than the rest of the programs. CTRL+down makes things smaller in every other program, why should FF do it the other way around. I’m happy that FF developers have an affinity to make things consistent.
And that’s all about theory, this was very annoying, so once I saw this article I changed it back to “normal” behavior immediately.
Thanks for the help.
25 June 2008 @ 7:00 pm
Thank you for finding a quick fix. FF3 new scroll wheel + ctrl method sucked big time. To me if I roll the mouse wheel towards me I feel like I am pulling the screen towards me and making it larger. This is the way it should work why they ever changed it in FF3 I have no idea.
Thank again!
27 June 2008 @ 3:01 am
Thanks! This was starting to pi** me off!! Hate it when this kind of thing suddenly CHANGES! Ahhhh, but it’s all better now. Seriously, you rock!
03 July 2008 @ 2:18 am
I installed some crappy zoom extension and after that the scroller zoom does not work at all. Any tips about how to get it back working again?
03 July 2008 @ 7:04 am
thank you thank you
03 July 2008 @ 8:49 pm
@Andras Szekely: Google Earth also zooms in on CTRL+down, so FF2 was not the only program with this behaviour. I also think it is far more intuitive.
11 July 2008 @ 1:56 am
A thousand thankyous!
Shouldn’t this be configurable via the UI anyway?
11 July 2008 @ 8:02 pm
Thanks! This was bothering the **** out of me.
15 October 2008 @ 3:33 pm
This really helps, thanks for posting the fix.
01 December 2008 @ 4:01 pm