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How can I fix touchpad scrolling in Firefox?

  • 4 replies
  • 4 have this problem
  • 10 views
  • Last reply by philipp

Quarterinch
Quarterinch
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Touchpad scrolling started malfunctioning a long time ago on my Acer laptop, only with Firefox. The screen didn't move, and a rectangle shows up and quickly shrinks and disappears, in horizontal line with the pointer at random vertical locations, on initial contact with the touchpad. For one other annoyance, as I scroll it up or down, the pointer moves up or down with it, which gets annoying at the edge of the screen. I'd started using Chrome, but will come back to Firefox when I can make it work.

I adjusted a setting in about:config to get touchpad scrolling to work. That was the ui.trackpoint_hack.enabled preference. It was -1. It's now set at 1. I also tried 0. Scrolling works now, except that the rectangle still pops up and scrolling still does not work at all in Gmail.

Thanks.

Touchpad scrolling started malfunctioning a long time ago on my Acer laptop, only with Firefox. The screen didn't move, and a rectangle shows up and quickly shrinks and disappears, in horizontal line with the pointer at random vertical locations, on initial contact with the touchpad. For one other annoyance, as I scroll it up or down, the pointer moves up or down with it, which gets annoying at the edge of the screen. I'd started using Chrome, but will come back to Firefox when I can make it work. I adjusted a setting in about:config to get touchpad scrolling to work. That was the ui.trackpoint_hack.enabled preference. It was -1. It's now set at 1. I also tried 0. Scrolling works now, except that the rectangle still pops up and scrolling still does not work at all in Gmail. Thanks.

Modified by Quarterinch

All Replies (4)

smorele
smorele
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Hi, Quarterinch, do you have the same behavior without using the trackpad but with a USB mouse? Can you check if you trackpad drivers are up to date ?

This may give us some information to ensure your problem is clearly related to firefox.

Thanks, Sébastien

Quarterinch
Quarterinch Question owner
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When I read your reply, I went to the Acer website and downloaded the touchpad driver. At first I thought it was better, but again, the touchpad will not work at all with Gmail, and the same weird rectangle keeps showing up. I'd have to find a mouse. Going over to Chrome, or Word, Excel, and everything else works fine, so I don't know how that can be anything but Firefox. Thanks

Modified by Quarterinch

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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You can try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.

  • Options/Preferences -> General: Performance
    remove checkmark: [ ] "Use recommended performance settings"
    "Use hardware acceleration when available"

You need to close and restart Firefox after toggling this setting.

You can check if there is an update for your graphics display driver and check for hardware acceleration related issues.

philipp
philipp
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i think the rectangles are fallout from the fix for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345355 ...