282140 - two-finger touchpad scrolling moves back/forward in history instead

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Misty De Meo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/125.5.6 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/125.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

The new line of PowerBooks has added a feature that scrolls through an application when two fingers 
are held down on the touchpad instead of one. In Firefox, however, moving up acts as "forward" and 
down as "back" in the browser history, instead of scrolling properly. (It does begin scrolling as it 
should, but then immediately moves back or forward in the history.)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Firefox
2. Navigate to a new site from the home page
3. Scroll using two buttons on the touchpad
Actual Results:  
The browser goes back or forward in its history, depending on the direction.

Expected Results:  
The browser should scroll up and down the page as with a scrollwheel.

Comment 1

[Dave Hsu]

Vertical scrolling is not actually the problem.  Horizontal is, and in two ways.

First - Firefox 1.0 (Mac) is excessively sensitive to the horizontal two-finger
scroll feature now standard in 2005+ Powerbooks.  Even a slight deviation in the
gesture from vertical will produce horizontal scrolling events which Firefox
treats as history back/history forward.  You will need a current-production
Powerbook with the genuine Apple two-finger scroll feature to examine this
behavior; pre-2005 Powerbooks using Daniel Becker's modified touchpad control
(http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/) do not exhibit this same
sensitivity.

Second, Firefox does not appear to honor horizontal scrolling from the touchpad
at all, on either machine.

Comment 2

[Dave Hsu]

(In reply to comment #1)

May be relevant to bug #266684

Comment 3

[Ben Hourigan]

version: latest nightly

I can confirm this, though for me this is the same bug as 251356. I'm using the
new two-finger scrolling on a Powerbook, and the driver will attempt to scroll
horizontally if the user makes even a small horizontal movement. If this occurs
while the user is trying to scroll vertically, it can look like the resulting
action is caused by the vertical scroll movement, but it is not. I tested this
by disabling horizontal scrolling in the iScroll2 preference pane.

PC users may experience similar confusion if they move a horizontally-sensitive
scroll-wheel slightly to the left or right while trying to scroll up or down.

The default behaviour for a horizontal scroll-wheel movement should be to scroll
horizontally, not to go back or forward in the history.

Comment 4

[Deborah Mero]

I have had the same problem which only occurs on Firefox not on other applications. I can find nothing 
in the preferences that will change this even though I was directed to go to preferences/advanced/
mousewheel . .  .
There is no mousewheel setting in my preferences panel.

I have one of the new 2005 12"powerbooks running OS 10.3.7 ( I have not upgraded to 10.3.8 because 
of e-mail problems in that upgrade).

Again, this is the only application that I have encountered this problem with.

Comment 5

[Tim Tesluk]

I'm having the same problem as well. OSX 10.3.8 12" powerbook with the
two-finger scrolling built-in.
As the others above me, this only happens in Firefox, not in Safari.

Comment 6

[Noah St.Amand]

I found a solution on this page:

<http://macusersforum.com/lofiversion/index.php?t4804.html>

Type "about:config" in the address bar. Look for these fields and change them to
these values:

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines to 1

It seems to work. Since I did this scrolling horizontally now scrolls the page
horizontally instead of sending me careening through the history.

In my opinion the default behaviour should be changed, so even though there's a
work-around I think that this is still a bug. The default behaviour makes
trackpad scrolling almost unusable.

Comment 7

[L. H.]

*** Bug 287949 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[L. H.]

Bug 246879 was the fix for the same problem in Camino

Comment 9

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

*** Bug 288066 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Hiro]

*** Bug 289215 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Kevin Brosnan]

Attachment: the Camino patch migrated to Firefox.js

This is my first patch. I talked a user on IRC through adding the lines in the
Camino patch to his prefs.js, the user stated that it solved his problem.

Comment 12

[John Howard]

I ran about:config and changed the two values as suggested.  It seems to work...

(In reply to comment #6)
> I found a solution on this page:
> 
> <http://macusersforum.com/lofiversion/index.php?t4804.html>
> 
> Type "about:config" in the address bar. Look for these fields and change them to
> these values:
> 
> mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
> mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines to 1
> 
> It seems to work. Since I did this scrolling horizontally now scrolls the page
> horizontally instead of sending me careening through the history.
> 
> In my opinion the default behaviour should be changed, so even though there's a
> work-around I think that this is still a bug. The default behaviour makes
> trackpad scrolling almost unusable.

(In reply to comment #6)
> I found a solution on this page:
> 
> <http://macusersforum.com/lofiversion/index.php?t4804.html>
> 
> Type "about:config" in the address bar. Look for these fields and change them to
> these values:
> 
> mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0
> mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines to 1
> 
> It seems to work. Since I did this scrolling horizontally now scrolls the page
> horizontally instead of sending me careening through the history.
> 
> In my opinion the default behaviour should be changed, so even though there's a
> work-around I think that this is still a bug. The default behaviour makes
> trackpad scrolling almost unusable.

Comment 13

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Comment on attachment 181495 [details] [diff] [review]
the Camino patch migrated to Firefox.js

this should already be fixed on trunk with roc's changes on 03-28

Comment 14

[Kevin Brosnan]

It looks like this might be already fixed in the trunk is there anyone who is
watching this bug who could try a nightly
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/ or in a
week or so the Developer Preview. This problem should have been fixed by Bug 163215.

Comment 15

[dtayd]

DIAGONAL movement while two finger scrolling results in movement back and
forward in history (loss of web messages)

Comment 16

[Mitchell Lewandowski]

i am running on a new profile (the deer park pre-alpha [20050523] on 10.4.1),
and i am now happily confirming that i do not see this issue anymore. :)

Comment 17

[Kevin Brosnan]

Fixed by Bug 163215. 

Note that this fix is currently only on the Trunk, the first offical release
with this patch will be 1.1. 1.0.x releases will never get this fix, as it is
not a security bug.

If anyone still sees this problem on trunk builds feel free to make a comment or
reopen the bug.

Comment 18

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

*** Bug 303456 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[Jesse Ruderman]

This was fixed by a patch in bug 231718, not bug 163215.

Comment 20

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

*** Bug 296829 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 21

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 305942 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 22

[xolaware.llc]

wasn't there anyone that actually likes this feature besides myself?

i've been using it with regularity, and i am sad to see that this behavior will
go away in the next release i pick up.

maybe this is not the place to file the "feature request", but since the person
who fixed this is probably getting this email, what is the likelihood that a
"secret feature" can be added so i can edit my config file from the advanced
settings and have the option of having 2-finger horizontal scrolling move
forward and back a page?

(adding a UI-toggle to the prefs would be even better, but i understand could be
significantly more work ...)

Comment 23

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

(In reply to comment #22)
> wasn't there anyone that actually likes this feature besides myself?

You can always edit your about:config so that it does back/forward.. more
information in the mozillazine KB[1]. But I think the main issue is that it's so
easy to accidentally trigger left/right mousewheel with the 2 finger touchpad.
You have to move it almost perfectly straight up/down to make sure you scroll
the page correctly.

The feature to go back/forward is pretty useful, but binding it to an accel key
+ sideways would cause less accidental triggers. (Which would be more useful
when Bug 171680 is fixed)

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries#Mousewheel..2A

Comment 24

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 311693 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 25

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 302779 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***