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Friday, April 5, 2013

Fixing the runaway text zoom on Firefox and Macs

Another day, another crazy Firefox finding. This time, it's about scroll inertia and zooming on the Mac. I sometimes "throw" a scroll in order to hit the top or bottom of a page. This seems to be buffered by the OS and it means the current program gets scroll events for a while longer.

I found a similar annoyance with the whole "scroll, then push control" thing back in 2011. This time, it's the same sort of interaction, but the command key is implicated.

In short, two-fingered trackpad scrolling inertia plus the command key equals huge fonts or tiny fonts. Yep, it seems to have jumped from control to command, and the thing I squashed 18 months ago is back.

This time, the fix seems to be mousewheel.with_meta.action = -1.

I can only assume this happened with Firefox 20, since it seems to have sprung back to life in the last several days. I don't think I started behaving differently for no good reason.

That's what really bothers me about changes like this. For a couple of days, you think you're nuts. Then you have to go digging for changelog references in order to regain your own sanity.