On Mac OS X I can mouse over something (without clicking on it or giving it complete focus) and use the scroll wheel to scroll it. On Windows (7 at least) which I'm forced to use in my new job, it does not work this way. Is there any way to change this behavior?
I notice that Firefox does this within the app: if any Firefox windows have focus then you can scroll any other Firefox window that doesn't. (So at least the Firefox people think this is a useful feature! And so anyone not familiar with how it works on OS X can see what I'm talking about.)
I remember TweakUI (which does not seem to be available for Windows 7) having a setting for "Focus follows mouse", but I don't recall if it allowed setting that only for the scroll wheel. I don't want the full X-Windows style focus-follows-mouse setting, just the ability to scroll whatever I mouse over.
UPDATE: According to @Mikey's comment, this is now built into Windows 10.
UPDATE: it has been suggested that my question is a duplicate of this question. That question seems to be concerned specifically with multiple controls on a single window, where keyboard focus is on the wrong control, but not on the wrong window. I'm asking about a situation with multiple windows. Any given solution has the potential to handle both use cases, but it is not a foregone conclusion that it would. It would be possible for any piece of software to handle one use case and not the other. They are similar, but they are not the same question.
Best Answer
X-Button Mouse Control!
This thing rocks... it is very intuitive to tech-people, don't know about to a normal person ) but if you figure it out, it is really powerful.
http://www.highrez.co.uk/downloads/XMouseButtonControl.htm
and yes it solves this scroll/hover problem too:
but it is so much more
For instance some of the things I use it for:
I have a Logitech Marathon mouse which is great because it has hyperscrolling and the batteries last 2 years but in Chrome for some reason when the hyper wheel is spinning, sometimes it can zoom your pages when you press CTRL. This happens a lot. So with this app I disable ctrl-mouse wheel when chrome is being used. Something that cannot be done by chrome itself
I set it up to alt-wheel up/down control the system volume. Quite useful
I configured alt-left click to take a screen shot of the active window, alt-right click for a full screenshot
I set 'Alt' key to activate 'Layer 2' (Settings > Modifier Keys), then on 'Default' profile in the Layer 2 I set Wheel Up/Down to scroll Window Left/Right respectively.