Uncontrolled tab bar scrolling
I restarted firefox today, and now I have the following behavior: I have a window with many tabs open, enough that I have the little '<' and '>' scroll buttons in the field. Whenever I move the mouse pointer into the tab area (including the scroll buttons, but not the '+' (new tab) button to the right), unless I am actively clicking, the tabs start scrolling rightward until only the rightmost set of tabs are visible. The window being viewed does not change. I can use the 'v' tab selector to the right, and it will select the chosen tab and make that visible in the window, and make the selected tab visible in the tab bar, but when I again move the pointer into the tab area, it starts scrolling to the right. Similarly, I can click on the '<' scroll left button, or double or triple click on it, and it will scroll the tabs leftward; but immediately after completing the action, the tabs will scroll rightward to the end again.
It seems my problem is the same one as in this thread but there was no solution given there (the problem persists after restarting Firefox in troubleshooting mode). I see the same behavior as that poster with the tooltips in the tab bar, but drop-down menus such as on this submission page seem to be working normally for me.
Asịsa ahọpụtara
So it turned out that there *were* some other contexts in which the scrolling was happening, although it wasn't common. I noticed it among the Windows settings menus in particular -- so that ruled out it being Firefox's problem. I believe that the culprit is the wireless keyboard itself or a faulty USB receiver for it, since the problem has stopped after removing that.
Thanks for the help!
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Normally the tabs only scroll if you move the mouse wheel while the mouse pointer is hovering over the tabs. It sounds like your Firefox may be confused about what is happening with your mouse's scroll wheel. Does the wheel work normally in other places?
Are you using a wired mouse or a wireless mouse ? In case of the latter, maybe check its battery.
Did you try to close and restart Firefox or reboot the computer ?
I had the same thought about the mouse, but it doesn't appear to be the problem. I use a wired trackball mouse, and it is working normally in other contexts -- in fact, I can use the scroll wheel to scroll left in the tab bar, but immediately after I stop scrolling, it sends it to the right again. I have also tried replacing it with a different, also wired mouse, and the problem persists. Yes, I rebooted computer and firefox (not in that order), problem persists. I also tried replacing the battery in my wireless keyboard, in case the event was coming from there, still a problem.
Is there an equivalent to xev (the event tracer in X-windows) on windows?
I now have some other interesting information to report, which seems to confirm that Firefox is seeing a persistent scroll-right event or similar.
When I hold down the Control key, which I did for an unrelated reason, firefox immediately zooms out until it is at minimum zoom, which is the same behavior that it does when you hold Control and scroll the scroll wheel (or hit Ctrl - I think? But I don't think that does anything in the tab bar).
However, in other contexts, like typing into this text box or just scrolling through a displayed window, the scroll wheel works fine.
Asịsa Ahọpụtara
So it turned out that there *were* some other contexts in which the scrolling was happening, although it wasn't common. I noticed it among the Windows settings menus in particular -- so that ruled out it being Firefox's problem. I believe that the culprit is the wireless keyboard itself or a faulty USB receiver for it, since the problem has stopped after removing that.
Thanks for the help!