Mousewheel/touchpad scrolling in Browsers

desktopmousescrollingtouchpad

I'm not exactly sure how to formulate this, however:

When I scroll using mousewheel or two-finger touchpad gesture, the page in Chrome or Firefox continues scrolling for a bit after I've put my fingers aside from touchpad or mouse.

I don't want this feature in my system, and I'm not sure how is it called. This feature sometimes leads to unwanted behaviour, e.g. if I use ctrl-hotkey in a short sequence after scrolling, page zooms, even though I don't scroll at the time.

2 questions – how this thing is called, and how do I disable it entirely without disabling wheel/touchpad scrolling?

Best Answer

Feature is called "Coasting speed". To disable it you can use:

xinput --set-prop --type=float "<your device>" "Synaptics Coasting Speed" 0 0

to list devices you can use:

xinput list

alternative variant (for touchpads) is synclient options (there are 3 of them):

CornerCoasting          = 0
CoastingSpeed           = 0
CoastingFriction        = 0

Related Solutions

Configure the laptop’s touchpad to only do scrolling

I couldn't get only two-finger scrolling to work, but I was able to expand the edge scrolling so it takes over the whole pad. That works for me. Here's what I did:

1) Enable edge scrolling vertically and horizontally, but not "coasting":

xinput --set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'  'Synaptics Edge Scrolling' 1 1 0

2) Set the left and right "edges" of the trackpad to be 0. They default to being some value in the thousands, making a little border. Use xinput --list-props to find the initial values — the 4282 value for the bottom edge comes from that. I've also set the top edge to 0, on the grounds that that doesn't hurt.

 xinput --set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'  'Synaptics Edges' 0 0 0 4282

3) Set the scrolling distance (amount your finger has to move before triggering a scroll event) to about double the default, because that was too fast:

 xinput --set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'  'Synaptics Scrolling Distance' 250 250

With this, I can use the touchpad just to scroll, without it moving the cursor around. (And the high distance set above keeps me from triggering it accidentally.)

Mouse Scrolling – How to Scroll the Screen Using the Middle Click

The feature you are talking about is called "Auto-Scrolling". It lets you press and hold the middle mouse button and move your mouse to scroll smoothly. In Linux, the default behavior for this action (pressing middle mouse button) is generally pasting text.

However, there is a preference setting in Firefox and an extension available for Chrome/Chromium which would let you use the middle mouse button for scrolling and activate this feature.

Firefox

Open the "Options" tab: "≡" (Open menu) → "Options".
Navigate to "General" (it should open to "General" by default).
Scroll down to "Browsing". Under "Browsing", you will find the "Use autoscrolling" option. Put a check mark beside this to activate this functionality in Firefox.

Or just search for "autoscrolling" using the search bar.

Chrome/Chromium

For Chrome/Chromium we can use an Extension called "AutoScroll" (from kaescripts.blogspot.com).

Go to this link on Chrome Web Store (obviously using Chrome/Chromium).
Click on the button labeled "+ ADD TO CHROME" to install this extension.
Click on "Add" in the Confirmation Dialog Box.

Other Applications

As far as other applications are concerned, I haven't yet found a solution for them. Anyways, it's the tall webpages that create most of the problems for which both Firefox and Chrome/Chromium have a solution.