Firefox keyboard scrolling problems?
If you don't want to the read the whole article, I'll sum it up briefly: turn off caret browsing!
Firefox has a feature called caret browsing, which can be enabled / disabled by clicking F7 or ticking the checkbox under Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General and "Allow text to be selected with the keyboard" (or "Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages" for Firefox 2). This is somewhat misleading as text can be selected with the keyboard even without caret browsing. The main difference is that the keyboard navigation keys (e.g. the cursor keys, PgUp, etc.) will affect the caret rather than the page location.
In short, if you find that the keyboard navigation keys don't act as you expect them to, turn off caret browsing.
Firefox has a feature called caret browsing, which can be enabled / disabled by clicking F7 or ticking the checkbox under Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> General and "Allow text to be selected with the keyboard" (or "Always use the cursor keys to navigate within pages" for Firefox 2). This is somewhat misleading as text can be selected with the keyboard even without caret browsing. The main difference is that the keyboard navigation keys (e.g. the cursor keys, PgUp, etc.) will affect the caret rather than the page location.
In short, if you find that the keyboard navigation keys don't act as you expect them to, turn off caret browsing.
posted by j.shoehorn @ 10:45 pm
19 Comments:
At 10:25 pm,
Anonymous said…
Geez! How obscure can they make it?
The inability of firefox to scroll properly has been driving me CRAZY. How should I know that F7 toggles between sensible and senseless behaviour.
Thanks for this discovery.
No thanks to the firefox developers who planted this idiotic gotcha.
At 9:52 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thank you also for this hint. I was looking for smoothing keyboard scrolling (up/down) for a while (trying different extensions), but this is simply what I need. Why not set by default in standard Firefox configuration ?
At 8:07 pm,
Anonymous said…
I'm fairly certain that firefox "ships" with that feature off by default. As I have never experienced it with my numerous installs. It most likely gets turned on by accidentally tapping the F7 key, then unkowingly allowing it to be turned on. Then as both of you have expressed, after some time realizing that you can no longer use pg up pg down keys to scroll.
At 10:47 pm,
Anonymous said…
looks like it pops up a message in the newest versions of firefox to tell you that you're about to mess everything up when you hit f-7
At 4:31 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thanks a million...that was driving me crazy...I didn't know what was going on!
At 12:15 pm,
Anonymous said…
- THANK YOU ! -
I only recently accepted the march of progress once more and jumped ship from Mozilla 1.7 to firefox.
The idiotic scrolling behaviour from the keyboard was getting beyond a joke and seriously threatening my mental health... Now I can actualy enjoy browsing again, cheers :)
At 4:56 am,
Anonymous said…
Thank you! I was just about to kill myself.
At 1:31 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thanks, I was losing my mind with the FF keyboard "scrolling". Well, not any more. Thanks to you!
At 7:14 am,
Unknown said…
I looked and looked for a cure to this for some time and it was really hard to search even with Google. Hardly anyone talks about it.
I finally found it by accident while going through the options and then keyed the accessibility feature into Google search and finally found some, and yours is the clearest. I sure wish I'd come upon it sooner. I HATED that blocking of PgDn and PgUp !!!
Thanks very much. I'm bookmarking your page in case I come across other oddities.
At 10:34 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thank you.
It was driving me crazy too
At 3:50 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thank you.
The name of the feature and the location for changing it did not make it at all intuitive. I have struggled with this behavior for a long time. You do a service to Firefox with this post.
At 10:37 am,
Anonymous said…
F7 ??? OMG !
God bless you for writing this note. I am also one the countless "it was driving me crazy" type. Life will be so much better now.
At 8:10 am,
Anonymous said…
I have another hint for that situation (because sometimes even F7 didn't help). Hitting CTRL-F for the search function allows to use UP/DOWN/PageUp/PageDown on the page (without leaving the search). Of course Right/Left/Home/End keys navigate within the search field but sometimes after hitting ESC the UP/DOWN/PageUp/PageDown/ Right/Left/Home/End continue to work.
And of course sometimes (because of frames or focus within an input field) nothing works except clicking once into the page.
Armin Freiberg
At 12:20 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thank you for making my life easier :)
At 9:21 am,
Anonymous said…
Another tip, if you have a CTRL+F find bar open in another Firefox window, it can cause the current Firefox window not to scroll properly.
Problem appears intermittent.
At 11:34 pm,
Anonymous said…
Thank you! I was so frustrated! My child somehow turned it on and I had no clue what she did!!! It is solved - yey!!!
At 2:53 am,
Chad said…
THANK YOU!!! I've learned so much about the Fkeys these last two years. Every time one of my kids gets near my keyboard, something goes wrong. I've been dealing with bad scrolling for months.
At 10:23 am,
Anonymous said…
just wanted to say......
A BIG BIG THANK YOU!
I think the problem is the bad keyboad linking. This is an option that shouln't be linked to such a simple key that you might press by mistake(F7), especially when it's so close to "move to next frame"(F6) and "refresh"(F5) . It should had been attached to a more complex keyboard sequence and maybe not so well-hidden in the menu.
If not for people like you spreading the news , i think the FF user rates will have dropped for sure.
Air this on the national TV , jericho man!!
At 3:06 pm,
Salahuddin said…
Thanks a lot man! You saved me a lot of headache!
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