{"id":576,"date":"2009-10-28T10:06:12","date_gmt":"2009-10-28T14:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/?p=576"},"modified":"2009-10-28T10:06:12","modified_gmt":"2009-10-28T14:06:12","slug":"mousewheel-zoom-eurek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/2009-10-28\/mousewheel-zoom-eurek\/","title":{"rendered":"Mousewheel Zoom Eureka!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Firefox, you can make the page text larger and smaller by holding down the Control key and rolling your mouse scroll wheel up and down. Before continuing to read, I want you to think about which direction makes more sense: should scrolling down make the page get bigger or smaller?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My natural intuition is that I should scroll down to make the page get bigger. This doesn’t match the default Firefox setting, or my wife’s natural intuition. For a long time I’ve wondered why I would have such a strong feeling that scrolling down would make the page bigger. Today, while doing morning browsing activities, I’ve finally figured it out.<\/p>\n

When the page gets bigger, the bottom of the page scrolls down. The opposite happens when the page scrolls up. So I’ve been using a visual cue of the page scrolling for the scroll wheel. My wife thought about this and said “I’m not a visual learner, so I never thought of it that way. I just thought ‘up is zooming in’.” (She’s a teacher, can you tell?)<\/p>\n

I have the exact same problem in Google maps: I think of it as “zooming down to see something” and consistently get it wrong. I’m not proposing that we change the default: my intuition is probably a strong minority. I just wonder whether there are other people like me, and whether there are common UI interactions where visual cues and logical cues don’t always match up.<\/p>\n

For those of you who care enough, you can change the default in Firefox. Navigate to about:config in your URL bar, click through the scary warning, find the pref “mousewheel.withcontrolkey.numlines” and switch the value from “1” to “-1”.<\/p>\n

\"Changing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Firefox, you can make the page text larger and smaller by holding down the Control key and rolling your mouse scroll wheel up and down. Before continuing to read, I want you to think about which direction makes more sense: should scrolling down make the page get bigger or smaller?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[64],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mozilla","tag-firefox"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":579,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions\/579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin.smedbergs.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}