September 24, 2004

7:45 AM

Going Insane: How do I turn off mouse gestures in Firefox for OS X? I've installed a couple of extensions which control gestures, but so far, nothing works. I hate gestures. The keyboard is faster.
posted by Mo Nickels to (5 comments total)

Can't you uninstall the extensions? What are they? Can you linky us so we can help?

Are they here? If so, might this help?
posted by mwhybark at 8:38 AM on September 24, 2004

No, you don't understand: mouse gestures are built in to Firefox. I installed the extensions in hope of turning off this "feature." It interferes with my uControl settings, which allow me to used the trackpad to scroll up and down pages. Unfortunately, this scrolling is sometimes interpreted as a mouse gesture.
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:57 AM on September 24, 2004

Oh, I get it. When I looked at the docs, I thought of those as mouse controls, since they appear to require a click. Is your uControl set to emulate the same keystrokes as Firefox is looking for (eg. click-drag for scrolling, rather than fn+doown arrow, or down arrow)?

Can't you remap them? I'm a Safari user, so no real help I guess.
posted by mwhybark at 12:32 PM on September 24, 2004

I'm usually a Safari user, too, but I user Firefox because it has proxy settings separate from the System's, so I can access my home proxy when I don't want people on the outside to see that I am browsing from work (I don't care what the people in the office see).

Anyway, I use the function-drag in uControl, which has nothing to do with any of the Firefox settings. In no way, as far as I can see, should Firefox even pay attention to the Function key. I'm completely habituated to the function key, so I'm not about to go changing things now. Firefox is the one going to get the boot, if anything.

This and the incompatibility of many extensions with OS X (such as those which offer single-window browsing, where when you click on a link in Mail.app, it's supposed to load in a new tab in Firefox, not a new window as it does now) point out the big lies: Firefox is not the same on every platform, and it's not better than Safari. What's the point of a cross-platform slimmed down browser if you leave so much shit out that people have to develop extensions for it? And platform-dependent extensions, at that? All many of these extensions do is access hidden preferences. Why not just make them visible and be done with it?
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:15 PM on September 24, 2004

Bah. Safari vs Firefox is apple and oranges. I love them both for different reasons. Safari has yet to have anything so intentive and useful as RSS-updating bookmarks, but then Firefox doesn't allow me to drag PHP images onto my desktop. You have some valid gripes, but Firefox is a great alternative, and it's open source.

Sorry, Mo, I don't know what you mean by Mouse Gestures. I'm using v. 1 on OS X 10.3.5.
posted by squirrel at 6:14 AM on September 25, 2004