Push-scrolling

I really like how the 770‘s Opera browser lets you scroll by pushing the page up with the stylus. This is a lot easier than trying to hit the little scrollbar – see Fitt’s Law. It conflicts with the idea of clicking-and-moving to select text, but maybe epiphany/firefox could switch to scrolling after a long click? Some applications in Windows seem to do this with middle-click, which might also be an option.

11 thoughts on “Push-scrolling

  1. I find the behaviour rather annoying since you keep hitting links by accident when trying to scroll this way. It is also very hard to push-scroll a larger amount. I very much prefer the auto-scrolling feature in Firefox. If you haven’t tried it yet, there’s a preference option to enable it.

  2. On macs, ffox uses the long click already, to bring up the right-click menu. This is really convenient on eg powerbooks with the one mouse button. (this is a bit odd since all other apps do it with clover-click, but in ffox I find myself always using the long click version)

  3. Isn’t this similar to using the middle button on Firefox to scroll the text? For that one must have Smooth Scrooling or Auto Scrolling enabled in the Advanced Options of FF.

  4. I proposed that behavior on the Epiphany mailing list approx. a year ago. They said it could (and should) be implemented as a plugin. It’s also even more useful in Inkscape (it already does this), I hope it will work in Gimp, too, one day.

  5. Epiphany’s auto-scroll extension is different, it implements the windows (IE) behavior. IMO the Opera thing is more intuitive.

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