Initially, I was happy to have the trackpad on the new 12″ Powerbook provide back and forward navigation through Firefox’s browser history. It struck me as a Good Idea.

That is, until I realized just how obscenely sensitive Firefox was being to horizontal movement. I would be scrolling down a long page, reading, or writing an entry here, and would move just enough to the left, and would find myself on the previous page in history. Often this provided a pretty decent amount of frustration, especially if I lost the text that I was entering on a page’s form.

I finally decided to go look for the cure, and found it in a setting in Firefox’s config.

Enter “about:config” into the location bar where you’re normally type a URL, and scroll down until you see these settings;

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines

Change .action to 0 and .numlines to 2 and the back and forward will go away, to be replaced with “normal” horizontal scrolling that you can use to move side-to-side on those really wide web pages.