SmoothWheel 
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Feedback/Comments
View older comments on the old systemComments regarding smoothwheel or anything else are welcome.
[Jump to last post]| [1] By: kno on 2008-05-11 - 16:38:59 |
| First off thanks for developing SmoothWheel! The acceleration feature makes scrolling long pages so much more enjoyable... but now for a problem: I'm using SmoothWheel with Firefox 3 Beta 5 and it seems like the zoom function (ctrl-mousewheel) only works sporadically when SmoothWheel is enabled. Most of the time when I hold down the ctrl key and rotate the mouse wheel, Firefox just scrolls - sometimes though, it zooms. Zooming works fine when SmoothWheel is disabled, be it via the options screen or by entirely disabling the extension. |
| [2] By: avih on 2008-05-11 - 16:39:26 |
| @kno: Oops. You're right. For some reason I considered it to be a Firefox bug.. but now that I'm trying again, it's clearly related to smoothwheel. Thanks |
| [3] By: avada on 2008-05-11 - 16:39:52 |
| Smoothwheel has some bugs. Smooth scrolling doesn't work on this page: http://www.pcx.hu/eger_billentyuzet/billentyuzet . Also if I type in the searchbox on wikipedia and I press down to select one of the suggestions the page scrolls down. There are some ff3 specific problems too. On a wikipedia page if the references are in two columns smooth scrolling doesn't work. ( e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_(TV_series)#References ) On this ( http://www.fincher.org/tips/Languages/csharp.shtml ) page if I scroll the cpu usage jumps to maximum and scrolling really slows down. |
| [4] By: avih on 2008-05-11 - 16:40:14 |
| @avada: Thank you very much for the detailed feedback. Regarding the two examples where smoothwheel doesn't work, I have a feeling they're related to the same issue and I'll have a look at it. Regarding the the CPU usage on the 3rd URL, it's a known issue of firefox which happens on pages with fixed CSS background, and also happens in any other scroll, with or without smoothwheel, while dragging the scrollbar, etc. The issue is that Gecko renders these pages very slowly (in more than one pass) and therefore, it's especially noticeable in smooth scroll implementations, including smoothwheel. If you think it's still a smoothwheel issue, I'd very much appreciate an example for page where it only consumes high CPU in smoothwheel but not while dragging the scrollbar or using Firefox's built in smooth scroll. Thank you very much for your comments again. avih |
| [5] By: Recall on 2008-05-12 - 13:30:07 |
| Hi, avih I have been using yet another smooth scrolling, since you had not updated this in a long time. Well the one thing this has over YASS is fps lock, which stops the horrible tearing! However I find the scrolling is much more reliable on YASS and works on all pages including http://www.pcx.hu/eger_billentyuzet/billentyuzet whereas yours does not. The issue with the high cpu usage as you may know will be fixed in the next version of FF with compositor. What I would ask is that I feel YASS has a better implementation of smooth scrolling for me, maybe you guys should get together to make the ultimate smooth scrolling extension? Either that or swap codes as it open source, dunno? Nice to see ya back! |
| [6] By: avih on 2008-05-12 - 17:27:33 |
| @Recall: SmoothWheel, as well as YASS, are both composed of distinct 2 sections: 1. Scroll/Smoothness algorithms and their options. 2. target detection. Both extensions use target detection code borrowed from AIO extension, but each tweaked a bit differently. Although quite similar in most cases, the different tweaks is what's causing these extensions to apply differently to different pages and to different sections within a page. The reason SmoothWheel wasn't updated too frequently is that I've felt that it's quite rare that the target detection fails. Other than that, it's working well and always has been, so no need to update except minor bug fixes and enhancements, which happened occasionally. However, with Firefox 3 it seems as if more pages are "missed" by the target detection code, and as I've told avada on my previous post here, it's being looked at. Hopefully a new version will be released soon with better target detection, either re-borrowed from AIO or re-tweaked by myself or re-tweaked according to YASS. cheers and thanks for your comment avih |
| [7] By: GCG on 2008-05-13 - 06:07:06 |
| Works like silk on my Mac with FF3b5. Thanks for bringing SW back to the present. |
| [8] By: rm on 2008-05-15 - 09:55:50 |
| Hi. Great extension, thanks for your hard work. I'm running FF3b5 (tete009 build) on win2k. The last two times I have updated smoothwheel (via FF's builtin addon manager update capability) I have had all my smoothwheel options reset to default. you can contact me at (remove all the dashes and parentheses) (c-u-b-en-s--is) (AT) (f-l-as---h-ma-il) (dot) (com) if you need any further info. |
| [9] By: avih on 2008-05-15 - 12:50:01 |
| @rm: Smoothwheel is currently defined to reset all options when it updates to a new version. This is by design to prevent incompatible options between versions. I'll consider not resetting the options on future releases if there is no danger of incompatibility. avih |
| [10] By: steven on 2008-05-16 - 15:57:11 |
| hi. love smoothwheel. thanks so much for it. but... most recent update just dl'd to FF 2.0.0.14 (win xp pro) and said there was a problem with the dl. and now my profile is corrupted. couldn't start ff at all. and just had to restore it. thoughts on that? |
| [11] By: avih on 2008-05-16 - 16:08:46 |
| @steven: Glad you like it :) Did you download from AMO or from here? If there was a problem with the download then it probably is an issue with firefox itself since smoothwheel didn't have the chance to start working. It failed during the download. Regardless though, Smoothwheel has NO specific install/uninstall procedures. It's just standard xml files that tell firefox how smoothwheel should be initialized etc. Just like any other extension or theme. Firefox itself takes care of install/uninstall according to the user. Even further, smoothwheel doesn't read or write any file on the profile folder or outside of it. The only place where smoothwheel executes any kind of code is when it's triggered either by a mouse wheel event or by keyboard arrows events, and then it does its magic. It does absolutely nothing besides that. The source code is available for inspection by anyone just in case someone is suspecting that smoothwheel behaves badly. Could it be that your problem is unrelated to smoothwheel? Does it reproduce? does it always fail to install? I'd appreciate any further info you may have. thx, avih |
| [12] By: steven on 2008-05-16 - 19:15:03 |
| hi avih, thanks for your speedy reply! i think the problem must have been from the dl? as soon as i got the msg that there was a problem with it (i wish i had taken a screen shot of it), i pressed the 'continue' button and ff quit right away, before even starting up. every time i clicked on ff to start, i got an xp msg saying ff had a problem. even when i restarted, got the same thing. so i restored to a profile on another machine and it's fine. it even has the update from that machine of the latest version of smooth wheel. so i think it must have been a problem w/ the download... maybe it got corrupted or something? i don't know enough to say for sure. but anyway... it looks like things are ok. |
| [13] By: avih on 2008-05-16 - 22:13:02 |
| Thanks for the info steven. If anything similar happens again, or you think that you know why it happened, I'd appreciate if you could post it here. thx again |
| [14] By: Tim on 2008-05-21 - 14:32:37 |
| Love smoothwheel, thanks for a great add-on. |
| [15] By: Max on 2008-05-31 - 19:02:35 |
| I'm using the last version, and the fix for horizontal scroll doesn't work for me, I'm using a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 5000. |
| [16] By: avih on 2008-06-01 - 10:34:58 |
| @max: thanks for the info. I couldn't reproduce the horizontal issue myself since I don't have a horizontal scroll mouse, and the horizontal scroll of my touchpad doesn't work regardless of smoothwheel (although the vertical scroll does work there). Therefore, the fix is added into the code without being tested to work (but it can't harm either), and that's why it's described "experimental". Few questions if you don't mind: 1. Did u check the "Horizontal wheel fix" box on the "advanced" tab of the smoothwheel options panel? 2. Does your horizontal wheel work when you check the "disable smoothwheel" box on the main tab of the options panel? Does it work if you completely disable smoothwheel? thankx, avih |
| [17] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-04 - 00:51:07 |
| avih, Great extension! It really cleans things up on Firefox 3 for Mac. I'm in the same boat, re: horizontal fix. Doesn't work for me on Mac, using either touchpad or Logitech tilt-scroll. What does the bitmask correspond to? Is it something I could work out via some utility? Assuming your code works, I assume the bitmask is what needs to be switched up. |
| [18] By: avih on 2008-06-04 - 06:29:07 |
| To all those with horizontal scroll issue. First, let me describe what problem it tries to fix. The issue was that when smoothwheel is enabled, the horizontal scroll STOPPED working. That is, not that it isn't smoothed by smoothwheel, but that it broke completely. The fix tries to overcome this issue by trying to ignore mouse events which relate to horizontal wheel scroll. THIS EXPERIMENTAL FIX ISN'T ON BY DEFAULT and has to be selected from the advanced configuration panel. So, when you relate to this issue, I'd appreciate if you could describe the following (which is the expected result if all works well): 1. That with smoothwheel disabled or not installed, your horizontal wheel/touchpad scroll IS working. 2. That with smoothwheel installed and enabled, and the horizontal scroll fix is NOT checked, that the H scroll is indeed broken. 3. Same as 2 but the H scroll fix IS checked, hopefully it will H scroll as it did before installing smoothwheel (that means the fix works). Unfortunately, on my DELL D630 laptop (Win XP SP2), the touchpad's horizontal scroll works only in MS apps such as explorer and office, but doesn't work with Firefox at all (even when smoothwheel is not installed). The vertical scroll of the touchpad, OTOH, is working everywhere. So I can't personally reproduce the issue because I just don't have a working horizontal scroll for Firefox. As far as I know, Firefox (Gecko?) doesn't have a consistent method to indicate a horizontal wheel event, and that's why I had to resort to "black magic". The mask value is the event.detail value of events which smoothwheel captures. I found over the web that if smoothweel ignores event where the 15th bis is set (32768) then it ignores H scroll and that's what I've applied. The value can be changed from about:config if you know that H scroll is represented by a different bit. Any help by people who have followed me thus far and know better than me would be appreciated. cheers, avih |
| [19] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-04 - 13:46:47 |
| avih, Sorry, meant to include that and neglected to do so. 1a. Yes, works without SmoothWheel. 1b. Yes, works with SmoothWheel disabled from add-ons. 1c. Yes, works with SmoothWheel disabled from prefs. 2. Yes, broken with the box unchecked. 3. No, broken with the box checked. With SmoothWheel enabled, all hscroll events are interpreted as vscroll events, left is up, right is down. Unfortunately, this makes SW very flaky when you happen to scroll down and to the left. Keep in mind that on the Macbook Pro, scroll is a completely freeform two-finger gesture that moves you around the page, so this is a common scenario. On Mac, horizontal scroll works fairly universally. It's probably a somewhat different API than Windows. Perhaps you could put a quick debug mode in that makes SmoothWheel log and display mouse events? Then I could possibly see the event.detail of the horizontal scroll that SmoothWheel is catching and give you the bitmask back for your docs. Hopefully that's enough info for you. Let me know what else you need in the way of duplication, steps, logs, etc. :) |
| [20] By: avih on 2008-06-05 - 07:32:47 |
| Geo Mealer, you're the man (?) ;) Ok, your description is a very good starting point for me. Thank you very much. First, if you don't mind, few more questions: 1. What's the main scenario at which the bug annoys? i.e. when only vertical scroll bar appears? when both H and V scroll bars appear? when only H scroll bar appears? 2. In what scenarios (same scenarios as above) does the bug appear at all? 3. is it the same kind of annoyance in each of the scenarios at which the bug appear? After you've answered those, make sure the "horizontal fix" checkbox is checked and then please set the mask value from the about:config page to the following values, in this order (no need to restart firefox or anything. you can change them on one tab and immediately test if it worked on another tab) and test if the bug reappears after every change: 32768 (obviously isn't working) 16384 8192 4096 2048 1024 512 256 128 64 32 16 8 4 Please post the values which caused ANY kind of change, and what that change was for each of them. thx again, avih |
| [21] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-05 - 15:27:34 |
| avih: Well, the bug's two-pronged, right? a) Horizontal scrolling doesn't work, so when a h-bar is there, you can't scroll it via mouse scroll. b) It reinterprets as v-scroll, so when you scroll diagonally (no matter whether a bar's there or not) you can get simultaneous scroll-up/scroll-down events and the scroll jitters in place. So, to answer your questions: 1) The bug potentially annoys all the time. a) is only an issue when I want to scroll horizontally, but b) is an issue always, if I'm not careful to scroll very straight up and down. 2) and 3) really have the same answer. I'll cycle through the mask bits tonight, when I have a little more time, and will give you back a matrix or summary, as appropriate. Thanks for your attention on this. It's nice when the devs actually keep track. :) |
| [22] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-05 - 15:53:56 |
| Actually, that was a quick test. OK, mask bits down to 16 inclusive did nothing different. Left was up, right was down, smooth scroll active. This page is the test page, compressed horizontally to maybe 300 px so the scrollbar appears. Bitmask 8 made horizontal scroll work, but very chunky, like a third of the bar at a time. v-scroll is still smooth. Bitmask 4 made horizontal scroll work, less chunky (sixth of a bar or so?) but still nowhere near as granular as SW disabled. v-scroll is strangely jerky. I don't think it's reverting back to pre-SmoothWheel behavior, but it scrolls with little jumps here in there. Any chance it's not as simple as a single bit? These masks look like they're walking through a 16-bit value, one bit at a time, from left to right. |
| [23] By: avih on 2008-06-06 - 00:06:05 |
| First of all, thanks for your tests. Yes, it seems as if 1 bit is not enough, and maybe the solution should be a more correct one instead of trying to mask arbitrary bits. I'll have to think about it... Would it be ok if I send you test/debug versions of smoothwheel for you to test? You can find my email on the "members" section of this page. Or you could post yours here. cheers |
| [24] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-06 - 00:47:46 |
| avih, Sure, no problem. My email is geo@snarksoft.com. I use gmail as my primary, but I don't -think- it'd call an .xpi file an executable. If you get a nastygram back from their attachment filter, rename the extension and resend. |
| [25] By: avih on 2008-06-06 - 06:50:44 |
| Geo Mealer and everyone else having issues with horizontal scroll, your help is needed. Please head over to this test page: http://smoothwheel.mozdev.org/test_events.html Use your horizontal and vertical scrolls, and please let me know what values change, and how (and specifically, the relevant values for up scroll, down scroll, left scroll and right scroll). Thanks in advance. |
| [26] By: avih on 2008-06-06 - 14:48:35 |
| Also, regarding my previous post, if you follow it, then please also state your operating system and firefox version. thanks |
| [27] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-10 - 13:18:33 |
| avih, Sorry for the delay! I tested with SmoothWheel disabled from SW's preferences. When I get a moment, I'll try with SmoothWheel completely removed. OS: Mac OS 10.5.3 (Leopard) Firefox: 3.0RC2 So, this may not be helpful. The only two values changing are the timestamp and detail. However, they change identically for horizontal and vertical. Detail ranges from -N to +N, where N appears to be an acceleration factor (1 for very slow movement, >1 for larger movements). Left = -N Right = +N Up = -N Right = +N Just tried again with mouse instead of trackpad. Bumping the tiltscroll gives me N = 1 as above. So does moving the wheel one click. This would explain why you can't tell them apart. I have no idea what the differentiator is, but it doesn't seem reflected by these values. |
| [28] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-10 - 17:17:57 |
| BTW, anticipating your next question, the same ranges and types of detail values were used for h-scroll vs. v-scroll. I saw mostly from 1-20, concentrated to the lower (again, mostly a factor of how fast I was scrolling) Nothing indicated to me set/unset bits as a differentiator, and I read "bitmask" pretty well. Values varied between odd and even for both, and didn't seem to "skip" any ranges that would indicate an unset bit. |
| [29] By: avih on 2008-06-11 - 02:22:50 |
| Yah, so it ain't as simple as I hoped it would be. The reason I've used the masked detail property in the first place is that it was reported that +/-32768 indicated a horizontal event. While I do believe it works on some systems, it obviously isn't working on OSX. On top of that, it's ugly. There should be a well defined method one can identify H or V events. After trying to ask some gurus and still failing to get a reply as for how can one differentiate H from V events, I've opened a new bug in bugzilla ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438426 ). Let's hope it gets some attention. Meanwhile, any suggestion is still welcome, and of course, thank you very much for your help. It's very appreciated :) cheers, avih |
| [30] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-11 - 02:29:56 |
| No problem. It's not a solution, but it's closer to an answer, and that's something. I'll keep an eye out for updates! |
| [31] By: avih on 2008-06-11 - 15:03:28 |
| Quick update: the bug I've filed is a duplicate of this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378028 As it now seems, It won't get into Firefox 3. At least that's what I understand. I'm still looking for a solution, suggestions are still welcome. avih |
| [32] By: avih on 2008-06-12 - 04:05:50 |
| Last update for now on the horizontal scroll subject. No extension can dustinguish horizontal from vertical mouse wheel events, including smoothwheel. It has been confirmed here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378028#c26 . Whenever it's fixed for Firefox, I'll update SmoothWheel to reflect and use that info. Untill then, it seems as if no good solution is possible in this regard. HOWEVER, knowing how it behaves, one can "trick" the system and make smoothwheel ignore horizontal wheel scrolls as follows: If you can set your horizontal wheel scroll to work withOUT acceleration, and choose different number of lines to scroll for vertical/horizontal scrolls (both should be a power of 2, i.e. 1 or 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 etc), then if you set the mask value to the horizontal scroll lines, it *should* work. Example of steps: 1. IMPORTANT: disable acceleration of wheel scroll 2. set vertical scroll for 2 lines per scroll 3. set horizontal scroll for 8 lines (or steps/clicks etc) per scroll 4. enable "horizontal fix" in smoothwheel 5. set the mask in "about:config" page to 8 If the settings can be achieved manually, then theoretically it should fix the issue. your input is welcome. avih |
| [33] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-12 - 12:19:17 |
| That'll work, but you specifically need to disable acceleration on the small-numbered scroll. In your example, that's vertical. Otherwise, a fast vertical in that example will eventually spit out 8 as the detail too (i.e. 4x accel on a 2-line scroll). I'm not sure how nice the scrolling experience (particularly vertical) is without acceleration though. I'd suggest trying 1 for horizontal (accel off) and 2 for vertical (accel on) with a bitmask on 1. Unfortunately, Mac doesn't haven't an option to set scrolling acceleration, but hopefully it'll help the people running on custom mouse drivers like Logitech's. |
| [34] By: Geo Mealer on 2008-06-12 - 12:22:15 |
| (Wow. "Doesn't haven't" Edit before Enter, Geo...) |
| [35] By: devnull on 2008-06-15 - 19:38:06 |
| Hi! I just downloaded SmoothWheel for the first time, you said to leave a comment: it's great! I wish all programs had this functionality :) |
| [36] By: GollyJer on 2008-06-17 - 17:57:17 |
| Just wanted to drop a note and say THANK YOU!! for this great add-on. I didn't realize how much I had gotten used to it until upgrading FF3 today and noticing that the default scrolling, even "Smooth Scrolling" sucks. Regards, Jeremy |
| [37] By: avih on 2008-06-18 - 11:45:12 |
| :) thx |
| [38] By: CtMidnite on 2008-06-18 - 12:01:59 |
| I uninstalled SmoothWheel because 3.0 has a built in Smoothwheel. Well it was pretty jerky I thought so I reinstalled this addin and while the built in is better than nothing, this addin is incredibly smooth. You can read while scolling. I've used it for over a year now and would like to say thank you for making it. |
| [39] By: Anthony on 2008-06-20 - 17:03:08 |
| How do we install this in Thunderbird? Right click save as does not save it as an install xpi. |
| [40] By: avih on 2008-06-21 - 23:09:03 |
| @Anthony: Either on the installation page, "Get all versions" link, or here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/357?id=357 |
| [41] By: Judicator on 2008-06-22 - 12:33:39 |
| Very nice extension, I use it regularly and I find it useful, it allows me to keep concentrate on what I'm reading. Many thanks. |
| [42] By: Jeremy on 2008-06-23 - 14:02:59 |
| [Feature Request] The ability to use the right click of the mouse wheel as a setting in "hold while scrolling to acheive". |
| [43] By: avih on 2008-06-25 - 00:42:20 |
| on behalf of vgrigory: --------------- hello avih I found a bug in smooth scroll. here is the description. In firebug I get this error: "Use of getBoxObjectFor() is deprecated. Try to use element.getBoundingClientRect() if possible." |
| [44] By: 13xforever on 2008-06-28 - 02:10:35 |
| Hi, I've found a little problem with your extension. Steps to reproduce: 1) go to http://www.vistadb.net/blog/articles/linq-test-for-custom-ienumerator/ (just stumble onto this at this page) 2) scroll a little bit down, to the Example code section 3) wait 'till scrolling will stop 4) point your mouse cursor over the Example code block and try to scroll... no smooth scrolling at all 5) move mouse pointer out of this block (to the side) and try again - it should work. Firefox 3.0, Windows, latest SmoothWheel 0.44.14 |
| [45] By: avih on 2008-06-28 - 07:15:03 |
| @13xforever Please see comments 3-6 avih |
| [46] By: Keiran230 on 2008-06-29 - 17:39:11 |
| Doesn't Opera have this with a clean install? |
| [47] By: avih on 2008-06-29 - 22:12:39 |
| @Keiran230 IMHO, this is better than Opera, and in any case, way better than what Firefox has by default. Shouldn't that be enough? ;) |
| [48] By: Anando on 2008-06-30 - 23:58:19 |
| Bug I found - when on www.scribd.com the iPaper flash app, which they use to show documents, scrolled fine previously with mouse over it and stopped whole page from scrolling at same time. But with smoothwheel, page keeps scrolling as well (it is not desired). |
| [49] By: Anando on 2008-07-01 - 00:03:59 |
| Otherwise, great addon, ability to slow scroll while reading long texts is just awesome. |
| [50] By: willie on 2008-07-02 - 15:15:39 |
| Downloaded it yesterday, spent and entire day using SmoothWheel. Absolutely no problems, either in the download or in normal use. Beats having to use the slider on the side of the screen! Thanks Avih. |
| [51] By: Vahagn on 2008-07-02 - 22:15:27 |
| while using smoothwheel it throws such an error: "Use of getBoxObjectFor() is deprecated. Try to use element.getBoundingClientRect() if possible." |
| [52] By: Doomie on 2008-07-06 - 07:03:18 |
| Great idea Avih! I really appreciate your work, nice job. I was using Opera 9 until i heard about firefox 3 got released... Then i went to try it out, but i didn't enjoy it as much as I did on Opera, because on firefox it was much less enjoyable to scroll through a loooong page. But when i was about to switch back to Opera (because i liked the smooth scrolling) I noticed this great add-on by Avih :D And found out it actually was ALOT better then any of the Smooth Scroll i've experienced. I really hope mozilla will integrate this into their firefox products :D |
| [53] By: avih on 2008-07-06 - 07:14:32 |
| thx Doomie :) |
| [54] By: stav on 2008-07-06 - 12:23:03 |
| brilliant why oh why cant billy G come up with something like this,makes reading pages so much easier A+ |
| [55] By: Awesoft on 2008-07-13 - 03:52:44 |
| I would like something like IPhone; a little of scroll when mouse wheel is released. |
| [56] By: Thadone on 2008-07-14 - 01:47:54 |
| Great addon! Well done. Like this way of scroling from Opera 9.5. Thax. |
| [57] By: Doomie on 2008-07-17 - 11:58:37 |
| _______ @Vahagn I don't get this problem, and I've used this almost since i started using Firefox (since 1 month) Try re-installing SmoothWeel properly. ________ @Awesoft You can edit this on the settings screen Just go to: "Tools > add-on > Click [SmoothWeel] > Settings" Then just experiment with the settings to suit your needs. ________ @Thadone Like Avih said before... " IMHO, this is better than Opera, and in any case, way better than what Firefox has by default. Shouldn't that be enough? ;) " I agree, this is way better. Thanks Avih for letting us have a nicer function at Firefox xD |
| [58] By: Mithgol the Webmaster on 2008-07-18 - 11:18:21 |
| Not only the predefined values for speed and step size and adaptive-duration and adaptive-step should be available, but custom (entered by user) as well. Waht if someone needs a value between 1/2 and 9/10 of page?.. |
| [59] By: avih on 2008-07-19 - 00:12:33 |
| Mithgol the Webmaster: Then S/he can ask me and I would tell them to enter about:config at the address bar, enter smoothwheel at the filter field, and alter the extensions.smoothwheel.compoundStepSize value. Positive values are relative of page height, and negative number are absolute number of pixels. On a more serious note, much thought has been put into selecting the values that the users can choose from, and naming then. It's much easier for the vast majority of users to select from a clear and small amount of predefined set of values which cover most useful range, rather than use arbitrary values or endless number of options. Furthermore, some values, such as the adaptive values, are far more complex than a single value, even if they seem that way on the dialog, and have been fine tuned by hand to those presets. However, for advanced users who need even further control, entering about:config and modifying the values arbitrarily is possible for most values, and even more, the extension can always be modified at the source code as it's freely available. Feel free to edit it yourself. You have not convinced me that allowing arbitrary values in the options dialogue would be beneficial for the majority SmoothWheel users. I actually think that allowing more configurabilty would harm the usability for most users. avih |
| [60] By: Paul R on 2008-07-19 - 17:52:21 |
| My knowledge isn't as TECHie as some of the others who have entered their comments, but I surely appreciate Smooth Wheel. Yep, I surely do. Thank you so much. |
| [61] By: Dagobert_78 on 2008-07-28 - 12:18:32 |
| Hi Avih, I'm a member of the BabelZilla Team () a website whose goal is to provide as many as possible translations of extensions and documentation about Mozilla applications and where the volunteers of International (Spanish, French, Japanese, Russian, etc) Forums, without distinctions, have chosen to join their efforts. Thus a developer has the possibility to internationalize his extension(s) adding other new localizations and beginning one stable and continuous collaboration with all "his" translators! :-) The benefits for creators are: * No more "scattered" announcements or demands * More synchronization of localizations * Smaller time of wait * Easy friendly feedback from translators on the forum thread of your extension, with test and bug reports if anything is worth mentioning. All you have to do is: * register as a developer, then submit your extension here: , (a new forum thread is automatically created!) * have a look from time to time and grab from the Web Translation System the zipped locale folders (you'll receive an email when a locale is released). We already have 70 different nationalities among translators, so it is quite interesting to spread the extension(s) worldwide. Moreover, most of translators generally mirror informations and links on their own national boards about your extension as soon as you make a new official release (*BabelZilla does not release any extension, it is developer's privilege). Of course we wish to be warned whenever you intend to make new releases, so we quickly update our locales and you can make the new release WITH all locales! Actually, I translated manually your extension. It's here : http://extensions.geckozone.org/SmoothWheel/ Greetings Dagobert_78 |
| [62] By: dt on 2008-08-01 - 10:42:12 |
| Just started using SmoothWheel 0.44.14.20080509 on Vista Ultimate 32bit with FF3.0.1 and I see an issue when reading the comments at Slashdot. For example, try going here, http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/08/01/1152237.shtml (I'm not logged into Slashdot) Scroll down through the comments using the wheel. Slashdot page layout has been changing lately, and they have some new fangled UI elements that will soon hug the top of the view area. These UI things look normal but as I scrolled, the UI elements sensed they were about to be scrolled out of view and they "stuck" themselves to the top. As soon as they starting hugging the top, smoothwheel behavior became real choppy. It was a noticeable difference. Does anyone else see this effect? |
| [63] By: avih on 2008-08-01 - 14:14:23 |
| @dt: Just tried and noticed it. However, it also happens without SmoothWheel (more noticeable when the internal smooth scroll is on). The reason is that the page executes some code when that menu is about to get scrolled out of the screen, to make it "stick". That code execution takes time and therefore slows the page draw, which causes any scroll to be more choppy. Nothing can be done about it except for slashdot doing some code optimizations. avih |
| [64] By: dt on 2008-08-01 - 20:30:31 |
| > Just tried and noticed it. However, it also happens without SmoothWheel (more noticeable when the internal smooth scroll is on). Crap. I had not compared to non-SmoothWheel behavior yet. But since I have no intention of going back to life without SmoothWheel, I had no interest in trying that until I heard from you. > Nothing can be done about it except for Slashdot doing some code optimizations. Crap. I was afraid of that, too. SmoothWheel or no SmoothWheel, but I hate that stupid Slashdot sticky UI element. I have noticed, however, that by logging into Slashdot, that stupid sticky UI element doo-hickey is (thankfully) turned off. Problem is, I don't bother to login most of the time. Thanks for looking into it. |
| [65] By: avada on 2008-08-28 - 06:10:56 |
| Hi avih! Will the bugs I mentioned before be fixed? What do you think about smooth scrolling with page up/down? |
| [66] By: allyn on 2008-09-05 - 10:12:01 |
| Great plugin, but it seems to have a bit of an issue: The scrolling is significantly shorter than what is selected in the 'step size'. It appears to only scroll 1/3 of the selected step size. For example, if set to 1/2, will actually scroll 1/6th. I have tested the following: - Using Firefox portable 3.0.1 (no other add-ins installed) - Logitech G5 mouse with standard drivers - Windows XP 32 bit - Verified 'bigger' / 'smaller' steps work as expected (but still only scroll 1/2 of setting) - Verified pgup / pgdn still scroll by one full page - Selected 'use with keyboard' and up/dn keys do same as scroll wheel (i.e. 1/2 of step size setting) - Changed mouse scroll wheel settings in control panel (full page / x lines, etc) - no effect - Resized the Firefox window - no effect (still 1/2 of the setting) I've eliminated everything possible, having only this add-in installed on an otherwise clean install of XP. Could firefox not be reporting the proper window size back to smoothwheel? Is there some way to get smoothwheel to double its scrolling? |
| [67] By: allyn on 2008-09-05 - 10:22:15 |
| On further investigation, it appears the time setting is also performing 1/2 to 1/3 of the selected speed. Setting to 1/10th results in about 1/4 of a second. Setting to 1 second results in 2-3 secs. |
| [68] By: avih on 2008-09-10 - 03:19:14 |
| @allyn: To the "uninitiated, it indeed may appear as if you're correct. However, please note that the tooltip states that the value is only the base value and it's modulated in real time according to the advanced adaptive step and adaptive duration values (which are enabled by default). This feature is what allows you to scroll less pixels (and more time) per wheel scroll event if you're scrolling slowly such that you can follow the text easier, but allow more pixels and shorter duration per wheel scroll if you're scrolling faster to "scan" the page. The amount of this variation is changing dynamically in real time according to the speed of your scrolls, and can be controlled from the advanced panel. If you want a fixed step, just disable adaptive steps. if you want a fixed duration, just disable the adaptive duration. avih |
| [69] By: allyn on 2008-09-10 - 19:37:31 |
| @avih: Why not have the 'base values' be the starting point and not the 'max' point? It would make sense that the 'base' be just that, a 'base', i.e. starting point. Basically there is a very granular / precise selection (1/2, 1/3, 1/4), but that precision is completely lost because it only applies when they are scrolling at such a fast rate that there is no reason to be precise. Also, the current configuration makes it impossible to select something as simple as a full page scroll per wheel click. To put it simply, if the user sets full page scroll, they should get just that, and should not have to lose the acceleration to get it. |
| [70] By: avih on 2008-09-11 - 12:15:20 |
| @allyn: If the adaptivity is disabled, then the values are exact. If the adaptivity is enabled, then the "base value" is neither the minimum nor the maximum. It's about the average value between the minimum and maximum possible (both for duration and step). I believe, and apparently also many other people that use SmoothWheel, that the current implementation offers good usability with the default configuration values on one hand (that includes the default adaptivity), and good control and configurability on the other hand. Any suggestion for different default values is welcome and will be considered. I personally think that the adaptive features of SmoothWheel is one of the things that make it so pleasant to use, and I also think that it offers better usability than non-adaptive configuration. If you don't like it, just disable adaptive duration and adaptive step, and SmoothWheel will get as exact as I could program it. Regarding your request for exactness while keeping the "acceleration", and unless your definition of "Acceleration" is different than mine, I'm afraid it's logically impossible. Either it's fixed steps (non adaptive) or it "accelerates" and "decelerates" dynamically (adaptive larger and smaller steps). It just can't be both fixed and "accelerating". You can, however, disable only adaptive step (to keep fixed steps), while keeping the duration dynamic, or vice versa. It's all up to you. |
| [71] By: rasuba on 2008-09-19 - 09:07:01 |
| Thanks, working great! |
| [72] By: sheleftmeitchy on 2008-09-23 - 18:36:20 |
| This smoothwheel is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. It has changed my life. Im using the default settings, but am thinking about trying others. Thanks a ton, you really hit a homerun. |
| [73] By: allyn on 2008-09-24 - 20:12:14 |
| @avih: Regarding the 'exactness' thing, it is in fact possible, but the options for scroll size need to include steps that are larger than 1 page. Then users wanting adaptive steps could select for example a 2 page step size with adaptive step at 200%. This would make 'normal' scrolling full page with adaptive doubling the step. The current boundaries with configuration prevent a user from having both full page scrolling and adaptive steps simultaneously. |
| [74] By: avih on 2008-09-25 - 03:56:36 |
| @allyn: No software will ever be able to completely satisfy 100% of the people who use it. There will always be someone who wants another feature or extended configuration values etc. Since you're current the only one who asked for this (out of more than 1/2 million users who use it), I assume it's at least not an acute issue for most users. however, You can consider yourself lucky, because the value you seek can be extended using the hidden preferences: Enter in the address bar about:config, then enter smoothwheel into the filter field, and modify the value of extensions.smoothwheel.compoundStepSize to any value you want. Positive values are are relative of page height (i.e. 0.2 is 1/5 page, 1 is full page, 3 is 3 pages, etc). Negative values will translate into absolute number of pixels. Note though, that values which you set from the about:config panel, but that are not pre-configured on the standard configuration panel may not appear correctly and may reset if you modify values from the configuration panel. So there you are. Modify it as you wish, and please let me know your final configuration. I'd like to try that out myself too. cheers |
| [75] By: Joe on 2008-09-30 - 14:03:04 |
| I love SmoothWheel!!! |
| [76] By: ungern on 2008-10-03 - 02:35:34 |
| Just want to say thanks! This extension is the one I have used since Fx1. Really sweet. |
| [77] By: zebramidge on 2008-10-07 - 07:47:30 |
| aaak! upgraded to tbird 2.0.0.17 and smoothwheel doesn't work anymore with tbird, but it does work with firefox. tried upgraded to your last release. still no go. windows xp. tried a couple different mice with no help. any ideas? |
| [78] By: avih on 2008-10-07 - 10:06:42 |
| @Joe, ungern: thx :) @zebramidge: What were the previous versions of tbird and smoothwheel that did work? - Make sure smoothwheel is enabled both from tbird panel and that "Disable SmoothWheel" isn't checked on the SmoothWheel configuration page. - Try to check "Compatibility mode" - Could you please try it on a clean tbird install (maybe on a different computer)? - Any further related info that you can think of would also help. avih |
| [79] By: zebramidge on 2008-10-08 - 05:57:48 |
| was using a beta 2.0 version of tbird and last vers of smoothwheel. checked all above and did a clean install. no go. did check on my laptop and both current versions work together. go figure. just another windows mystery. |
| [80] By: avih on 2008-10-08 - 11:05:18 |
| zebramidge, sorry, I don't know what to say. It can happen that some extensions get corrupted somehow, sometimes due to usage of beta versions, sometimes just due to bugs of extensions of tbird or windows, etc. Since it works well for me and also for you on a clean install and I haven't heard others with the same issue, I can only assume that it isn't a smoothwheel issue. I suggest that you back up your messages database, remove (or rename) the profile folder, perform a clean install of tbird, resume your messages, and reinstall your extensions including smoothwheel. I really can't come up with an easier solution right now... Good luck, and please leave a message when you're done with it, I'd like to hear how it ended. cheers |
| [81] By: utefred on 2008-10-10 - 03:30:46 |
| I love this tool |
| [82] By: allyn on 2008-10-10 - 04:16:20 |
| @avih: thanks for the tip on editing step size directly in config. I ended up going with a 'custom' value of 1.5 with adaptive step set to low-200%. This resulted in a smooth full page scroll (roughly 90% of the page, so a few lines from the bottom are still visible on top once scrolled). This also resulted in accelerated scrolling of almost 2 pages per wheel click. Keep in mind this will only suit you if you want full page scrolling in regular browsing and greater than full page scrolling when quickly scrolling. For those types of users, it may be worth adding a few >1 page entries in the selection box, like 1.5, 2, 3. Either way, the custom settings are working just fine. Thanks again for the tip. |
| [83] By: avih on 2008-10-12 - 06:40:27 |
| allyn, glad you found a good setup, and thanks for sharing it. I'll consider your suggestion for next versions. cheers |
| [84] By: sparkythewondersquid on 2008-10-19 - 13:24:20 |
| I installed this a few hours ago and it was working great then when going through a page the scrool stopped working in fact the scroll bar dropped to the bottom of the page and stayed there i could not scroll up like something was holding the page down same on every page (and windows) even in add on manager window have you heard of this kind of thing before? i do have many add ons about:config tweaks and a few chrome css mods i would love to use this any info would be great |
| [85] By: avih on 2008-10-20 - 03:45:32 |
| sparkythewondersquid, I highly doubt that it's a smoothwheel issue. SmoothWheel only captures wheel events (and keyboard if enabled to) and acts upon them if it can, and that's it. It doesn't change any element of the page, including scroll bars. My suggestion is to gradually disable extensions (half of them at a time would be a fast strategy) and see if you can pinpoint the faulty one. Please share your conclusions here such that other can benefit too. Good luck |
| [86] By: sparkythewondersquid on 2008-10-20 - 10:27:36 |
| the problem is gone I removed from chrome.css */make inactive tabs smaller/* and google preview extension (it would not update) and updated "omnibar" maybe it was a connection problem I don't know but it seems to have fixed itself thank you for the response |
| [87] By: Daniel Ceregatti on 2008-10-21 - 10:25:48 |
| I've been a long-time fan of Smoothwheel. Thanks for making this. I'm wondering why the experimental code that fixed horizontal scrolling was removed? That worked perfectly, but has now regressed back to the old broken behaviour. I see the changelog for the latest version mentions that this is fixed for Firefox 3.1, and that this comment: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378028#c26 provides a way to have both Smoothwheel and proper horizontal scrolling, but it makes use of the "experimental" checkbox, which is now gone. Is my only recourse to use an older version of smoothwheel, or is there something else I can try? I'm not willing to use a beta version of Firefox. Thanks |
| [88] By: avih on 2008-10-22 - 00:40:20 |
| Daniel Ceregatti, the "experimental horizontal fix" was wrong in essence, and if it worked, it was just due to circumstances and it's definitely an incorrect "fix". There's no way SmoothWheel (or any other extension) can tell if the event was horizontal or vertical on Firefox 3.0.x or earlier versions. The information is just not available for extensions as you can tell from the same comment you linked to. The fix which is provided on that bugzilla page is only for firefox 3.1, and that's the method smoothwheel 0.44.16 now uses. However, if the "fix" worked for you and you prefer not installing the 3.1 beta, you can re-install the previous smoothwheel version (0.44.14) from the installation page, "All versions" link, and then deny the update notices. There are no major new features on this new version other than properly handling the horizontal scroll and slight refinement of soft-edge. Let me know if it worked. avih |
| [89] By: Daniel Ceregatti on 2008-10-23 - 09:38:49 |
| It seems that downgrading to 0.44.14 and enabling the experimental fix did not work. I suppose I could give Firefox 3.1 a try. I just dislike installing packages that aren't managed by my package manager, that's all. Thanks again! |
| [90] By: Giacomo on 2008-10-25 - 10:39:32 |
| Smoothwheel is a must-have. It radically changes the way you scroll down a web page, it makes things...smooth :) Superb, I use it since the first version came out. It's a pity it's not integrated into the O.S. :D |
| [91] By: Adam on 2008-11-09 - 13:25:10 |
| Works great for most of the pages I visit, though I'd like to be able to set some exceptions for some pages that become jerky with smoothwheel enabled... sorry if that's already possible, but I wasn't able to find how to set it up. |
| [92] By: ricc4rd0 on 2008-11-10 - 23:31:04 |
| As for for the "suggestion/scroll down bug" I must agree with Amada, this happens to me also. I mean this one: "if I type in the searchbox on wikipedia and I press down to select one of the suggestions the page scrolls down." I reported the bug in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/357 too using other words so I hope I made it clear there too. The problem seems to be with whispering forms only I think. It's ok if some suggestions are shown by Firefox itself (entered in forms/search bars) but if suggestions appear by whispering feature, holding down arrow key scrolls the page too. Anyway Smoothwheel is definitely better than Yet Another Smooth scrolling. |
| [93] By: ricc4rd0 on 2008-11-11 - 02:23:47 |
| me again - bite my head off - dont know how but the problem disappeared suddenly but i didnt make any changes. so sometimes the problem occures and sometimes not |
| [94] By: ricc4rd0 on 2008-11-11 - 02:53:53 |
| ignore my previous post - #93. problem is still here |
| [95] By: avih on 2008-11-11 - 06:35:28 |
| @Adam - Although it might be useful for some to have an editable "black list" for certain pages, I think it would require considerable effort, for which I don't have the resources right now. It's an interesting idea though, I'll keep that in mind in case I can find time for it. Don't hold your breath though. @ricc4rd0 - yes, the target detection (the algorithm which decides what part of the page to scroll) is not perfect and hopefully I'll be able to improve it one day. It's probably caused because you enabled "Use with keyboard", or else, smoothwheel wouldn't act upon keyboard events. I don't have a solution for it right now, but I will try again to find some time to improve it. Thanks for the feedback. avih |
| [96] By: foxyusr on 2008-11-11 - 11:45:47 |
| Hello avih, thanks for such great extension! As for some little bugs I have a problem when using Google Reader together with SmoothWheel I mean scrolling with arrow keys doesn't seem to work at all. My system: FF 3.0.3 / XP Pro SP3 |
| [97] By: knowhoot on 2008-11-20 - 02:46:06 |
| My oh my! I've been using this for 30 minutes and I love it! What a great add-on. Thanks! |
| [98] By: Kriston on 2008-11-25 - 06:40:56 |
| The scrolling steps are affected by the Page Scaling option. If I scale the page to 50%, the scrolling steps get 50% smaller. I wonder if this can be overridden somehow. |
| [99] By: avih on 2008-11-25 - 13:23:33 |
| @Kriston: I imagine you "measure" the steps in lines "units". SmoothWheel doesn't work that way. By default it scrolls a fixed percentage of the window height (set adaptive step to "disabled" on the advanced configuration tab for best measurements), but it can also scroll a specific number of pixels ("Step Size" on the basic configuration tab). I just tried with both full-page-zoom on and off. Works the same either way for me, and unrelated to the zoom factor. So, my answer is: the zoom doesn't affect the amount of pixels scrolled per mouse wheel scroll. Please correct me if I'm wrong, and give a specific sequence of steps to reproduce the issue, what did you expect, and what actually happened. |
| [100] By: Yael on 2008-12-02 - 07:41:40 |
| Thanks for this add on. I am probably missing a lot of its features, but as it is I already like it. I tried to "clean up" my extensions, leaving just the important ones, and by mistake I deleted SmoothWeel. It was terrible! But now that it's on again I'm all happy. Yet, I would appreciate it if you could just add a description to the regular people, like me, to better understand what options we're missing. Cheers. |
| [101] By: avih on 2008-12-02 - 10:24:15 |
| Shalom Yael :) I don't quite follow you. What do you mean by "Options we're missing"? All the options are available from the configuration panel. Tools -> Add-Ons, double click on SmoothWheel and set the options as you like. All have tooltips that explain them. Basically, what you see is what you get. You can play with the speed, steps and how dynamic they are. That's it more or less. You can always just modify different options, one at a time and see how they effect the behavior. Or am I missing something? |
| [102] By: Bobzor on 2008-12-16 - 19:13:14 |
| Thanks for this addon, it is so nice to use! Now all you need to do is make something to speed up my LCD's response time so it doesn't blur when I scroll :P It looks/feels amazing on a CRT! |
| [103] By: Peter on 2008-12-21 - 08:41:32 |
| As with YASS my scroll wheel does not work! The up and down keys do. I am using a laptop with a scroll on the mouse pad, software by Synaptics. This is probably a problem here but I thought you might be able to help. Thanks |
| [104] By: avih on 2008-12-21 - 10:51:22 |
| @peter: On some combinations of laptop/touch pad software, the touch pad scroll isn't interpreted by the system as a mouse-wheel scroll, and therefore any Mozilla add-on that looks for mouse wheel scroll will not see these events. On most laptops that I tested it does work properly though, including few with Synaptics software. I can only suggest to try and change the configuration of the Synaptics software. If you do solve it, please write your experience here such that others can use it too. avih |
| [105] By: Peter on 2008-12-21 - 13:01:38 |
| Thanks avih for your prompt response. Problem solved! It was the driver...I use a software called "Driver Detective" It seems rather popular but this is the second time I had to use other resources to obtain an up to date driver. However I used my control panel in XP and went to the hardware device drivers and updated there. I did get a warning but had no problem. Been trying for at least a year to resolve this for FireFox. Gotta remember to always try the simplest first! I loaded the IE v8 beta 2 hoping it would be better than beta 1. I had a hard time removing beta 1 a while back but beta 2 CANNOT BE REMOVED!!! And I don't like it so I wanted to get Firefox to work they way I wanted. BTW - Microsoft does not warn you about not being able to go back to IE7! Next is to find a way to get Linux to work with my SlingBox...then I'll be rid of Microsoft. Now your addon works delightfully. |
| [106] By: avih on 2008-12-21 - 15:27:16 |
| Glad to hear :) |
| [107] By: Anonymous on 2008-12-22 - 07:29:25 |
| Hey! Oky.. the license said so... ;) I got this to scroll chans. Works marvelous! I used it all the time without noticing. Can't scroll without it! smoothwheel FTW |
| [108] By: ttt on 2009-01-02 - 15:37:34 |
| great |
| [109] By: Nattgew on 2009-01-05 - 06:11:44 |
| I'm using a laptop, and the horizontal scroll on the touchpad is interpreted as a vertical scroll with SmoothWheel. With SmoothWheel disabled it works fine. I'm also running Linux, if that matters. |
| [110] By: avih on 2009-01-05 - 09:22:09 |
| @Nattgew: It's a known issue of Firefox 3.0.x . It's been fixed on Firefox 3.1 and seamonkey 2.0. Either use the beta or wait for it to be released. See bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378028 |
| [111] By: Dale on 2009-01-24 - 20:05:13 |
| Very nice, I have dyslexia and it helps me a lot. I have it on 3 computers. Dale |
| [112] By: Fady005 on 2009-02-02 - 03:10:14 |
| I can't modify the SmoothWheel options : http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/4171/sanstitrehn2.png. Is it normal ? Anyay the default fonctions are great ! |
| [113] By: avih on 2009-02-03 - 02:52:38 |
| @Fady005: No, that's not normal. However, after SmoothWheel has been in use for more than 5 years now, it's the 1st time I hear of such issue. My guess and suggestion: your Firefox/Mozilla/Thunderbird/etc profile was messed up somehow (maybe due to use of non-release version, maybe other bug, maybe a buggy extension, etc). Try creating a clean profile and see if it solves the issue. Please report your results. avih |
| [114] By: decrepitmoose on 2009-02-04 - 03:45:24 |
| Love it. Have used it since I found it some years ago and would miss it big time if it went away. |
| [115] By: Matias on 2009-02-05 - 20:51:28 |
| Hey, thank you very much for developing this incredible addon. I was looking for something like this since FF 2.0 and I never found it. Now I got it and is a new experience. Thank you again. |
| [116] By: hasan on 2009-02-12 - 09:18:39 |
| please add an option to smoothweel config that we can auto-hide scrollbar! |
| [117] By: avih on 2009-02-13 - 01:19:04 |
| @hasan: SmoothWheel doesn't change the interface. Alternatively, you can try this style: http://userstyles.org/styles/1084 but you have to first install the stylish extension or greasmonkey extension. |
| [118] By: smoothwheeluser on 2009-02-15 - 07:48:06 |
| It would be nice if there would be various options for use with mousewheel and keyboard! The Adaptive-Duration and Adaptive-Step I must disable when using keyboard to scroll (if I don't it's too slow), when using mousewheel it's useful. |
| [119] By: avih on 2009-02-16 - 03:08:20 |
| @smoothwheeluser: It's probably a good suggestion. It'll require some thought. I'll consider it. thx. avih |
| [120] By: Tonop on 2009-02-18 - 04:17:44 |
| Thank you ! |
| [121] By: shanahben on 2009-03-04 - 10:50:23 |
| This is just great! I recently installed Opera to try and see if it's better than Firefox, I am not completely impressed save for the way I could smoothly scroll down pages. I immediately switched to Firefox and searched for a way I could scroll smoothly in Firefox. I found a forum that said it's possible through about:config, I tried it and it sucked, the pages dragged---not scrolled. I went back to the forum and found a comment stating that your work is the best out there. So I went to Firefox add-ons and found this! AND IT WORKS GREAT!!! Thank you for sharing this! |
| [122] By: Danny on 2009-03-18 - 05:30:50 |
| Just added Smoothwheel to Thunderbird 3.0b2 Sorry for stupid question here, but exactly what is it suppossed to do? Cannot find any difference in function of Logitech mouse when scrolling etc. Thanks in advance.. Danny |
| [123] By: avih on 2009-03-18 - 08:43:12 |
| @Danny, Once installed, it should make scroll smoother, but only when scrolling the mouse wheel and ONLY on the content pane (i.e. where the actual messages are). It possible that various drivers (especially "complex" ones like logitech's) prevent actual wheel scroll events from getting to thunderbirs and thus smoothwheel does not recognize them. I can't do anything about it, but you can try enabling the keyboard in smoothwheel from the options page, click the message pane, and use the arrows (up/down) to scroll. Good luck and let me know if it worked for you. avih P.S. Got your email, but I prefer answering publicly such that others can benefit too. |
| [124] By: Ria on 2009-03-30 - 07:50:24 |
| Hi, Smoothwheel is broken on latest trunk due to removing getBoxObjectFor from non-XUL documents. More about it in bugzilla mozilla bug 340571. |
| [125] By: avih on 2009-03-30 - 10:12:00 |
| @Ria, thanks, I'll check into that. Hope the solution is as simple as comment #23 suggests (it usually never is though). BTW, do you know what upcoming application versions will use Gecko 1.92? (FX/SM/TB/etc) |
| [126] By: Ria on 2009-03-30 - 16:19:25 |
| With the next version (Firefox 3.5) the current Smoothwheel will work fine, but the version after that (now called Firefox 3.6 but the version number will change) will have the problem. So only the Firefox trunk testers (1.9.2) will experience the bug. |
| [127] By: avih on 2009-03-30 - 21:20:59 |
| Thanks. I think I've fixed it already. Hopefully I'll release a new version soon. Thanks again for the note. |
| [128] By: Pete on 2009-04-05 - 14:04:02 |
| Thank you very much Mr Developer! Very neat add-on, I only install the FF extensions I find really helpful for web surfing and this is one of them. Kudos to you and a five star rating. Cheers |
| [129] By: The Surgeon on 2009-04-08 - 03:32:31 |
| what he said ^ :) |
| [130] By: John on 2009-04-21 - 22:13:47 |
| same^^ Thanks! |
| [131] By: Joshua on 2009-05-28 - 06:11:45 |
| Wow this is a Godsend! I always hated how scrolling is extremely jerky, but this completely fixes it. Very well done! =) |
| [132] By: Jérôme on 2009-06-11 - 01:22:06 |
| Thanks for this nice tool. I would like to propose an enhancement of the keyboard scrolling. I like using the up/down keys for scrolling the messages I read. However I would like the keyboard scrolling to be automatically disabled when I'm composing a new message. |
| [133] By: avih on 2009-06-12 - 02:37:17 |
| @Jérôme, I see your point. I might add an option to disable the keyboard scroll at input boxes. Or do you think it should always be disabled on those because it just interferes (I don't use KB scroll myself)? avih |
| [134] By: Someone on 2009-06-25 - 20:32:45 |
| I think smooth wheel moves a little bit too slowly. could you improve the feature & make it faster? thanx Someone |
| [135] By: avih on 2009-06-26 - 01:08:53 |
| @Someone: First of all, the fact that you prefer it faster doesn't make it broken or needing improvement in this regard. It's your personal preference and others might have the exact exact opposite preference. Second, because indeed different people might have difference preferences, you can adjust the speed to your liking from the main options page of SmoothWheel. To do that you need to double click on the SmoothWheel item of the add-ons list (Tools -> Add-ons) and set the various options to your liking. avih |
| [136] By: clay on 2009-07-05 - 11:08:45 |
| nice add on, works beautifully. |
| [137] By: Byron on 2009-07-06 - 05:57:27 |
| It would be cool if you could make SmoothWheel work with the page up/down keys (as YASS does) and the little arrow buttons on the top and bottom of the scrollbar, and also the page up/down function that happens when you single click on an "empty" region of the scroll area (i.e., the area not occupied by the slider). In this way SmoothWheel could be a total replacement for the built-in "Use smooth scrolling" feature accessed via Tools -> Options, which in my opinion does not work that well. |
| [138] By: bloodfalls on 2009-07-06 - 08:42:51 |
| include a feature where smooth scrolling is automatically diabled while running on battery since it uses a lot of cpu |
| [139] By: Xakira on 2009-07-08 - 06:07:39 |
| When I started with Ubuntu Linux about a year ago I was sad to find Smooth Scroll didn't seem to work with it. I just tried it again after a recent major upgrade of my OS (to Ubuntu 9.04) and am so happy to have it installed again. I love just scrolling slowly down while I am reading the page. I use Easy (1/2 sec) and 1/10 page. |
| [140] By: avih on 2009-07-09 - 04:50:34 |
| Byron, PGUP/DN should be easy to add, I think I'll include it in the next release. Not sure how many of of the other triggers would be easy to add, but I'll have a look at it. bloodfalls, in all my tests (on many different systems) it never consumed more CPU than simply dragging the scroll bar. Please check and let me know if you find otherwise. Not sure if it's possible for SmoothWheel to monitor the power mode of the system. I might look at a way to make it easier to enable/disable it without opening the options page. Please note though, that to disable it you can just check a box on the options page and restart is NOT required. Xakira, glad you like it :) IIRC, it worked well on all Ubuntu versions (and other linux variants) since day one (~2003). Anyway, glad it's working for you now... clay and the rest, thanks for the comments guys, keep 'em coming :) avih |
| [141] By: riuryK on 2009-07-10 - 07:30:01 |
| Hi, avih. Thanks for developing SmoothWheel. It works really fine. I specially like the acceleration effect that you get when rolling down/up the mouse wheel quicker. So far I've found no bugs. Thanks again, and keep it up! |
| [142] By: AAlchemy on 2009-07-16 - 06:49:15 |
| Horizontal scrolling works in ff3.5, but its not smooth. Vertical is nice and smooth. Any work being done to smooth horizontal? |
| [143] By: avih on 2009-07-16 - 10:34:50 |
| AAlchemy, yes, Firefox 3.5+ finally supports distinguishing horizontal from vertical mouse wheel events, and smoothwheel supports it on recent versions for a while now. There are currently no plans to add support for horizontal scroll, it currently just leaves Firefox to "do it's thing" with it without any intervention. It would take a considerable effort to add it, but if enough people request, I'll reconsider. |
| [144] By: AAlchemy on 2009-07-20 - 06:04:14 |
| You should add a "Feature Request Poll/Vote" to this site, so people can vote on features. Maybe even a "Premium Feature Request" page linked to the Paypal donations. I'd throw in $20 to see horizontal smoothing! but I'd like to know it was actually being worked on if I did. |
| [145] By: avih on 2009-07-20 - 09:19:20 |
| AAlchemy, I didn't develop nor support smoothwheel for the money in it, as there isn't any and there never was. If you're interested, the donations over the years didn't even accumulate to $30, which is way less than even an hour's pay of an engineer, and that's with more than half a million users. Needless to say, I've spent hundreds of hours over the years developing it (including support, web maintenance, development of this comments system, etc). So it's obviously not for the money. I do it because I wanted such a feature myself and there was nothing similar when I started developing it, I publish it because I think others might find it useful too, and because I'm a nice guy in general ;) When I add features, it's because it's going to be useful either to me or to enough people to make it count. Since IMHO the vast majority of scrolling on the web is vertically, I didn't add a horizontal scroll support, although it's doable. But then again, if someone is willing to actually pay per hour for a specific feature, or at least an amount in that scale, I'm willing to make an exception ;) Till then though, any amount of donation is appreciated and considered by me as a "thank you" note for something you literally use for hours a day, every day. |
| [146] By: Just Me on 2009-07-21 - 03:29:58 |
| It won't even install in SeaMonkey 1.1.17 on Windows (XP, W2K). Chrome registration fails (error code: -239). Any ideas why this is happening? My other extensiones are: - Flash Block - Jump Link - Mnenhy - Preferences Toolbar - Reload Every - Tab Clicking Options - Tabs Menu Thanks. |
| [147] By: avih on 2009-07-21 - 04:00:12 |
| "Just Me", Although I test each release with every possible application, I just tried again a clean install of seamonkey 1.1.17 (the zip distribution) with clean profile, and SmoothWheel installed perfectly well from both addons.mozilla.org and from this site. I tried it on XP/SP3 as an admin (default) user. Could you please elaborate on the procedure and details? what exactly the error message was, type of user, type of SeaMonkey installation (multi user? non-admin? etc). Could you also try a clean profile? Thanks in advance. |
| [148] By: Just Me on 2009-07-21 - 05:51:37 |
| Hey avih, thanks for the quick response! I tried downloading the xpi package from addons.mozilla.org, and also a direct installation from mozdev.org and addons, but to no avail. The exact error dialog that I get when I try to install it in my profile (haven't tried in the application directory yet) as an admin is: ============================= performInstall() failed. _________________________ Error code:-239 ============================= When I click OK to close this error dialog, the main installation dialog says "Chrome registration failed." This happens in my 3 PCs, all of them with the referred SeaMonkey version and extensions. I'll try with a clean profile when I get back home. It seems to me that another extension is interfering with SmoothWheel. I'll let you know my findings. Meanwhile, is there anything else I could try or check (about:config, chrome directory or Mnenhy info, etc)? Thanks again. |
| [149] By: avih on 2009-07-21 - 09:08:07 |
| It does seem strange, especially because you experience the issue on 3 different systems, which implies it's not a random spontaneous corrupted profile. Considering the long history of relative stability of SmoothWheel, the only things I can think of are either a conflicting extension/s or some uncommon/non-default SeaMonkey installation/profile which I haven't tested. You should know though, that the old (as in pre 2.0) seamonkey/mozilla extension system is relatively deprecated (seamonkey 1.x is the only gecko app that still uses it), doesn't have the polish or capabilities of the Firefox extensions system and is quite crude, and that this install section of smoothwheel is one of the oldest untouched parts of the code, though it's always worked on all supported applications. Regardless, the "application profile" install is really really deprecated and not recommended, and it's kept for the sake of backward compatibility from the days extensions couldn't be installed into the user profile (2003 or so). User profile should really be the only choice. I can suggest that you 1st try a clean profile with default install of everything and see if smoothwheel installs ok. If it does, try to add your other extensions and see if a specific one conflicts with it, although I've personally never heard of such a conflict during an extension install phase. If that doesn't work, you can try previous versions of smoothwheel from here: http://downloads.mozdev.org/smoothwheel it seems 0.44.16.xxx was the 1st one supporting seamonkey. If that still doesn't work, I'd appreciate if you could just make sure that the MD5 of the xpi files match, just in case some strange network filter modified the data. The MD5sum of the latest smoothwheel-0.44.18.20090408.3.xpi (non-AMO) is a4968c1e98dab8810d3ab07296b1dda0 Also, on a personal note, I've been using seamonkey 2.0 (alpha/beta) for a long while and it's extremely stable and much more advanced than the 1.x branch. I'd recommend it even in it's current non-release state over the 1.x branch. Hope it helps, Please keep me updated. |
| [150] By: Just Me on 2009-07-22 - 03:44:38 |
| I finally managed to install SW, though I had to recreate my profile from scratch. Yesterday I couldn't reproduce the error using new profiles, so the only possible explanation was that something in my profile was corrupt (possibly due to older incomplete installations, or uninstallations using Mnenhy). I'll give SeaMonkey 2 a try when it's oficially released, but for now I'm really happy with the 1.1.X versions, as I was with the old Mozilla suite. I just hope SeaMonkey 2 keeps all the settings Firefox lacks. Thanks for everything, avih. |
| [151] By: avih on 2009-07-22 - 04:38:55 |
| Sure, glad to hear :) |
| [152] By: janna on 2009-07-23 - 17:05:41 |
| thank you very much this program, but i found out mozilla already has a simple version incorporated in firefox. i hope you get to a make this into an app for chrome though! |
| [153] By: dream on 2009-07-25 - 03:22:25 |
| A very great extension. I love it so much. |
| [154] By: jhozae on 2009-07-28 - 03:27:05 |
| Just installed this last night & it's great. Ever since 3.1, my page jumped around when I tried to scroll, or even just click something. Very annoying. Smoothscroll solves this, aside from making everything smooth. Love this! |
| [155] By: ckirchho on 2009-07-29 - 02:28:26 |
| One problem I found: - Browser: FF3.0.12 - URL: http://beta.editura.de When the mouse pointer is in the client area, I can only scroll a couple of pixels with the mouse wheel. Though if I move the pointer over the scroll bar and use the mouse wheel there, I can scroll the whole page. Other than that it's a great tool. |
| [156] By: avih on 2009-07-29 - 03:24:23 |
| @ckirchho, thanks, I'll look into it. |
| [157] By: Kuma on 2009-07-31 - 14:08:38 |
| Works well in forums and stuff kinda matches some mouses better though. |
| [158] By: Hotfoot982 on 2009-08-04 - 07:46:21 |
| I LOVE THIS! Its great. I would always hate it when I would scroll my mouse and it would be choppy and sometimes I would loose my spot on what I was reading. This really helps! 10/10!!! |
| [159] By: Naimh on 2009-08-04 - 20:40:13 |
| Cool app. Like it so far. |
| [160] By: Bypass on 2009-08-06 - 06:28:32 |
| Hello! Really great idea. I just installed it to firefox last night and it's helping already! 1 problem though, You said the arrow scrolling would be faster. But unfortunately it is the same. And also my eyes are getting dizzy, it might take some time for me to get used to it! |
| [161] By: DarkDagas on 2009-08-14 - 06:51:00 |
| hi...it's great....really smooth....thx for that...keep the good work...:D |
| [162] By: Peter J G on 2009-08-14 - 15:20:39 |
| Just installed WM and it works great |
| [163] By: UraharaZR on 2009-08-15 - 02:32:23 |
| Thank you very much for this super-sexy feature for FF. |
| [164] By: e1_designss on 2009-08-18 - 00:28:00 |
| Thanks a lot!!! excelent addon!! just what i was looking for |
| [165] By: Emily on 2009-08-18 - 19:12:22 |
| Fantastic add-on! |
| [166] By: Dmitry on 2009-08-19 - 05:42:09 |
| Really cool thing!!! Can you do the scrolling like in iPhone (when you pull the slider it slides it self with deceleration until it stops) |
| [167] By: AIM on 2009-08-31 - 01:34:52 |
| When I scroll over the frame in the middle of this page, the smooth scrolling stops working. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190320200203 |
| [168] By: A-) on 2009-09-05 - 06:32:21 |
| Very nice add-on, greatly improves the scrolling experience in Firefox. However, since I've had to get a new mouse, I've had some trouble (scrolling the wrong way or not at all). I'm guessing the reason for this is my new "Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000", which use a "high resolution" scroll-wheel - Which is to say it runs smoothly instead of "clicking" and I would guess it also sends a LOT of position-updates (or whatever). This seem to cause your code some confusion, probably a variable that overruns or some such (since it often goes the wrong way, especially if I scroll very slow or very fast). The funny thing is that my OLD mouse was also a Microsoft one, and it ALSO had the same kind of "high resolution" wheel, but it didn't have quite the same issues with SmoothWheel (though it didn't work perfectly). I'm hoping you will have the opportunity to do some testing with one of those Microsoft mice with a "high resolution" wheel (it should be possible to find a relatively cheap mouse with this technology, if you can't borrow one), and that you will be able to fix this problem soon... Thanks in advance, A-) |
| [169] By: avih on 2009-09-05 - 10:01:47 |
| A-) : Thanks for the report, It's an interesting one and it's the first time I hear of such symptoms. Could you please head over to http://smoothwheel.mozdev.org/test_events.html , scroll the wheel and report what you see? i.e. what fields change and what are their value ranges, possibly while scrolling up/down/slow/fast etc. I'll try to analyze your results and hopefully I'll be able to find a solution. |
| [170] By: bacon on 2009-09-06 - 15:54:27 |
| Hi, This extensions seems like just what I was looking for but I encounter a problem. Although the Add-ons page says that it works with drop-down boxes it doesn't for me. And it's not just that I didn't have smooth scrolling in drop downs, my scroll wheel won't move through the contents of a drop down at all. It works fine on the rest of the page. Looked at the comments here and didn't see anyone else having the same problem. Wondering if there's any way to fix this. |
| [171] By: bacon on 2009-09-06 - 16:00:42 |
| never mind comment #170, have no idea what the problem was, but it's back to normal after restart |
| [172] By: avih on 2009-09-06 - 16:14:17 |
| bacon, the detection code (the program section that detects what part of the page to scroll) does have some flaws. On most flawed cases it would just revert to the normal scroll (as if smoothwheel was disabled), but on some relatively rare cases it might prevent scrolling alltogether. However, on such cases, at least AFAIK on the last few years, it would still behave consistently, i.e. it would behave the same even if you restart/reboot/etc. My current guesstimation is that the issue you had is unrelated to smoothwheel, however, if it does happen again, I'd appreciate if you could try to isolate it and see if it's caused by smoothwheel or not. In case it is, it would be really helpful if you could describe the steps needed to reproduce it. |
| [173] By: Cat Czech Rep on 2009-09-08 - 06:34:34 |
| This add-on looks very good and smooth:-) Thanks for developing:-) Bye, Cat Czecch Republic |
| [174] By: dwight delleva on 2009-09-11 - 06:57:16 |
| When I play a youtube video, scrolling stops working. I have to click on an empty space before I can use the scrolling function again. Scrolling also stops when I hover on a youtube video. When I hover on any google ads, it scrolls but only with google ads, scrolling gets stuck in google ads. Hope you fix them. Thanks in advance. =) |
| [175] By: David on 2009-09-15 - 00:07:19 |
| Hello, First of all, I really like this extension, works great. However, I've notice an issue. While I have a very smooth scrolling when the Firefox page is relatively tall (on my 1920x1200 screen), if I reduce its height, the scrolling becomes a lot more jerky. Let's say if the Firefox page is half the screen height. I tried to set a fixed step instead of the default 1/7 page but it doesn't change anything. Any idea? This is in Firefox 3.5.3 with Windows 7 x64. |
| [176] By: David on 2009-09-15 - 00:16:01 |
| Would it be possible to get this to work in PostBox? (email client based on the Thunderbird engine). |
| [177] By: David on 2009-09-15 - 08:43:46 |
| Nevermind previous question about PostBox, at least in my case, as installing the Setpoint driver for my MX Revolution just gave me smooth scrolling in there. I'm sure other users with other mice could be interested though. As an aside, the MX Revolution gives also very smooth scrolling in Firefox without Smoothwheel, but I've noticed that there's still a benefit with Smoothwheel making small movements...smoother. With regards to previous issue mentioned about movement being jerky on shorter pages, it doesn't appear to be related to Smoothwheel as it behaves the same with Smoothwheel deactivated and using the smooth action from the MX Revolution... |
| [178] By: David on 2009-09-15 - 08:50:05 |
| Actually, I'll put the PostBox thing back on the table as it's still not a "smooth" scroll, but one message at a time for the tiniest wheel movement, so the add-on working in Postbox would be great, giving a feel similar to Apple's mail app. Sorry about the multiple post! |
| [179] By: Walter on 2009-11-08 - 16:33:44 |
| Hi, if i set the step size to "1 page", smoothwheel scrolls less then one page - even with 1.5 pages it is not enough for one page...(FF 3.0.15) Maybe i just misunderstood the setting, but how can i scroll one "real" page then? Thanks! |
| [180] By: avih on 2009-11-09 - 06:14:50 |
| Walter, set "Adaptive step" on the Advanced tab to "Disabled". This will disable the step-length modulation and you will get the exact step as defined on the "Basic" tab. When adaptive step is enabled, the actual step can either be longer or shorter than the defined step, according to the speed at which you scroll the mouse wheel. Hope it helps. |
| [181] By: Walter on 2009-11-09 - 08:53:50 |
| Thanks avih, it works! |
| [182] By: Jim on 2009-11-09 - 13:44:15 |
| Fine add-on, Avih. One thing though. It doesn't seem to work with PrintPreview 0.7.1.4 In fact, when SmoothWheel is enabled, scrolling in PrintPreview is disabled. Is there any way to have SmoothWheel enabled and scrolling enabled in PrintPreview? |
| [183] By: Kyler on 2009-11-09 - 14:13:24 |
| So I just found this today and LOVE IT!! It actually makes my other work on documents painful. Is there any way to apply this add-on to microsoft word or excel programs?? Please let me know, because that would be amazingly wonderful!! |
| [184] By: avih on 2009-11-09 - 15:20:56 |
| Walter, good :) Jim, thanks for the info, I'll try to look into it. Kyler, glad you like it. MS Office is a completely different technology than Firefox and currently there are no plans for such adaptation. |
| [185] By: Kyler on 2009-11-09 - 20:17:48 |
| That is a shame. If the adaptation was in fact made, I think you would have a slew of technology that would be very marketable. Like the scrolling of the iphone--it just makes it that much cooler. |
| [186] By: Valentin on 2009-11-13 - 06:23:11 |
| Hey, Fantastic extension - much better than the built-in smooth scrolling of FF; many thanks and congrats!! I do have one suggestion: it would be useful if we could set a list of exceptions, with websites where smooth-scrolling shouldn't be used. Sometimes the content doesn't follow properly - my latest example is Google Wave. Cheers, and keep up the good work!! :D |
| [187] By: avih on 2009-11-13 - 08:21:53 |
| Valentin, thanks for the suggestion. It's possible but it's an ugly hack. Not only it will crowd and complicate the user interface, it's also not the proper fix for the problem. The proper fix is that SmoothWheel either works (preferably always or almost always), or it doesn't and falls back to Firefox's default scroll. That's how it's programmed already, but apparently there are some exception pages at which it thinks it can scroll, therefore doesn't fall back to the default scroll, while in fact, it doesn't scroll. I'll try to fix it the proper way by improving the detection mechanism, but I can't specify a date for it... Although I realize it might be better than nothing, I really don't like the idea of such a workaround - it just seems too improper to me, from a developer point of view... |