Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Protip: disabling accidental text resizing in Firefox

Ubuntu, at least in its Pangolin incarnation, has this clever skeuomorphic touchpad behaviour: when you scroll with a glancing gesture, the scrolling continues for a bit after your fingers have left the touchpad, like flicking a playing card across a table.  It feels natural.

However, it often results in my Firefox fonts becoming randomly resized, as I frequently begin scrolling to the top of a page, then change my mind and highlight the URL bar via ctrl+L, and in that instant when the skeuomorphic scroll is happening and the ctrl key depressed, Firefox zooms.

The easy fix it to disable Firefox' ctrl+mousewheel zoom behaviour.