I was used to using Firefox as a browser on my PC, so I installed it directly on my Mac with my favorite plug-ins. But I ran into some strange behaviour when using the scroll ball in my Mighty Mouse. When scrolling horizontal the previous page was loaded. It looked like the forward and backward browser buttons where linked to the horizontal movement of the scroll ball.
This wasn’t what I expected and started looking around to see if this could be fixed. Horizontal scrolling worked like a charm in Safari and it should work in Firefox.

I quickly ran into the solution which was indeed a configuration change in Firefox:

  • Go to “about:config” (i.e. type it in FireFox’ address field)
  • Set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0

If you do this you will notice that you will stay on the same page when scrolling horizontal and even better, the pages moves horizontal when it’s wider than your browser window, just like in Safari.