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Single mouse wheel turn is ignored, doesn't scroll unless turn wheel 2-3+ times - how to fix?

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Just upgraded to Firefox 17 on a new win7 box. Now when I turn the mouse wheel a single turn, nothing happens. On my prior system a single tick of the mouse wheel would scroll whatever the system # lines was set to (e.g. 3 lines). Now I have to turn the wheel 2-3 or more ticks to get a scroll.

This is with smooth scroll off. (Smooth not helpful for me, I can't keep track of my place.)

To be clear, I like this as a way to scan a long page slowly, one little tick at a time. Really annoying when one wheel tick does nothing at all. (It works fine in other applications, so I know the mouse wheel events are being generated on each tick.) If it matters, it's a Logitech media mouse, running their intellipoint software. (And which worked fine on my old winXP system.) If it set it to use smooth scrolling, it responds to each tick of the wheel. (And of course drives me batty with the smooth scroll.) :)

I don't think it's the mouse or the driver, but it seems like some combination of the many settings just aren't there. All about:config preferences that match "wheel" are set to the defaults.

Anyone have any clues how to fix?

Thanks!

Just upgraded to Firefox 17 on a new win7 box. Now when I turn the mouse wheel a single turn, nothing happens. On my prior system a single tick of the mouse wheel would scroll whatever the system # lines was set to (e.g. 3 lines). Now I have to turn the wheel 2-3 or more ticks to get a scroll. This is with smooth scroll off. (Smooth not helpful for me, I can't keep track of my place.) To be clear, I like this as a way to scan a long page slowly, one little tick at a time. Really annoying when one wheel tick does nothing at all. (It works fine in other applications, so I know the mouse wheel events are being generated on each tick.) If it matters, it's a Logitech media mouse, running their intellipoint software. (And which worked fine on my old winXP system.) If it set it to use smooth scrolling, it responds to each tick of the wheel. (And of course drives me batty with the smooth scroll.) :) I don't think it's the mouse or the driver, but it seems like some combination of the many settings just aren't there. All about:config preferences that match "wheel" are set to the defaults. Anyone have any clues how to fix? Thanks!

All Replies (5)

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There have been changes to the mousewheel prefs as the consequence of implementing DOM3 mouse wheel scrolling that may be causing this.

You can try to set this pref to true:

  • mousewheel.system_scroll_override_on_root_content.enabled -> true
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Sadly, mousewheel.system_scroll_override_on_root_content.enabled -> true didn't help. I see there are a lot of mousewheel related settings, and I've tried playing with many, but I haven't hit on a combination that works. A single wheel tick still does nothing most of the time.

Anyone else have any thoughts? Do you all see the same thing? Is it a bug?

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Works fine here.

Try to boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if it works with the default mouse driver.

You can modify mousewheel.*.delta_multiplier_y prefs (vertical Y-axis) to change the vertical scroll amount.

The delta_multiplier are internally floats of type double and are converted to an integer for storing in a pref by multiplying them with 100 and are acting as percentages of the default scroll amount (i.e. 100 -> 1).
Set the mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y pref to 33 to change the scroll behavior from 3 lines to 1.

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It seems to be an interaction between Firefox and the logitech driver. It definitely has a Firefox aspect to it, since (a) it doesn't happen in other programs (i.e. in other programs each slow tick of the mousewheel is recognized). However it's also mouse related, as a non-logitech mouse in Firefox works fine.

I also wrote a small javascript page to test if Firefox is seeing the mouse wheel events. It is seeing them all. (I have the test page display a dot each time the mousewheel event fires.) One strange thing is that it takes several seconds after focus before it will respond to a wheel event. (Weird and annoying. And only happens with the logitech.) However, once it's responding, then it responds to each and every wheel event individually, no matter how slowly I tick the wheel.

Also odd, lists displayed in about:config respond to each wheel tick... so in that situation Firefox is able to respond properly.

I don't know Firefox's internals regarding mousewheel events, so I'm wondering, are there different kinds of events? Or does Firefox use a different framework for handling mousewheel events in about:config vs. in a normal content window? Or is there some different kind of event that the logitech driver sends vs. the regular mousewheel driver?

It didn't used to do this (okay, I was way behind on revs, back on 12.0 on my old box... :) though it's problems like this that make me shy away from updating!).

Thoughts???

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AHA!

Well, for anyone else facing this very disconcerting problem... It turns out the Logitech install software had installed a Firefox *add-on*. I noticed it by accident, disabled it, and voila, normal mousewheel operation. Whew. :)