For some reason, horizontal scrolling in Firefox causes the app to go back or forward in the browser history (i.e. the Back and Forward buttons in your browser). That’s just a weird default. It’s even more annoying with the Mighty Mouse because it’s so easy to inadvertently scroll to the side as you’re scrolling down quickly. It’s the problem with this kind of design where you have freedom to move diagonally.

The good news is that you can fix it in Firefox so that it behaves like a normal application. If you want Firefox to simply scroll the window horizontally when you use the horizontal scroll bar, follow these steps:

1. In the location bar (where you type in the URL/web site address), type about:config . This will present you with a list of hidden preferences that control Firefox
2. Find the following entries in the list:

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

3. Change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0 in the Value column
4. Change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines to 1

That should do it. Try scrolling horizontally and you’ll be all set.

My Mighty Mouse finally arrived in the mail today. I’ve been using it for the past hour or so and have a couple of quick thoughts.

First, the mouse is cool looking and much easier to get used to than I originally imagined. When I tried the mouse out at the Apple Store, the mouse felt a little bit awkward, like my hand was not in quite the right spot. Based on my use now, though, I think that may have been caused by the fact that I was standing up when I first used it and now I’m sitting down in my normal position (slouched, leaning back in my chair). It is a bit trippy not actually feeling the buttons, but after about 30 seconds, you really don’t think about it much.

Couple of problems have come up right away. I sometimes miss on my right-clicks and end up getting a left click. Not that big a deal for my work computer, but I’m thinking I don’t want to play games with this mouse. It could really suck to get the wrong click at the wrong moment in an FPS, for example.

Second problem is that the scroll wheel equivalent (which is essentially a little trackball) doesn’t give me the response I was expecting. It sometimes seems to skip and miss scroll events, but I think I may not be putting enough downward pressure on the thing (I’m afraid that I might click it). When I push down a bit more, I get a more consistent response, so I’ll play around with this some more.

The side buttons seem kinda useless because I don’t really drive things like Exposé or Dashboard from the mouse (the keyboard just seems more natural to me for those things…). I need to think of a better thing to map to it.

I’ll write more once I use it some more, but those are my quick impressions.