Mac Firefox Tweaks: Middle Click, Wheel Scroll
2005-03-11 20:48 - Tech
Well from my prior post you can probably see I'm getting aggrivated with some things in my attempted transition to the Mac, and OS X. One of the biggest ones is the fact that Firefox doesn't work too well in OS X.
First big piece of good news is that Firefox 1.1 is concentrating on improving the UI, especially in OS X. It's also due out in just a few months, with initial preview releases this month. I'm impatient of course, so I need a solution now! I browse around for a nightly build, and find the Mac version.
Fire it up, middle click a link, and I get it in a new tab. Joy of joys! Middle click the tab and it goes away, huzzah! But the adrenaline didn't last long, within a few minutes Firefox was crashing when opening any tab, with any method. I needed to try another version, but which? Enter The Burning Edge, a website dedicated to all the builds of Firefox, along with a bunch of great info about what the new ones change. Long story short, I found a page dedicated to mac optimized firefox builds. I grabbed the latest build there named FX-ppc7450-2005.03.11.dmg. Launched it and found first a cute icon/artwork set where the fox was wrapped around an apple logo instead of the globe, and more middle clicking ecstacy!
Not to be outdone I then dug up a tip page to fix firefox scrolling. In short, set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false. This turns off the normal scrolling mechanisms set by the system, which also (somewhat unfortuntely) disables OS X's native accelleration behavior. Once that is false, mousewheel.withnokey.numlines can be set to your liking, I use 3.
2005-03-15 19:31 - arantius
It's not just the new build of Firefox that fixed middle clicking. USB Overdrive is also required. I discovered this when I removed it, after previously thinking it alone was the solution.