Faster Page Scrolling in Firefox 3.6

Firefox 3.6 which was released a few days back claims to the fastest Firefox browser. Although the browsing speed with Firefox 3.6 might have increased, you can also increase the speed of page scrolling in Firefox 3.6 with a simple hack. Scroll acceleration is a new feature included in Firefox 3.6 which enables you to scroll pages faster especially if there is lot of content in the page.

To speed up page scrolling, open a new tab and type about:config. Click the button “I’ll be Careful, I Promise”. Now in the search box, type ‘mousewheel.acceleration’.

You need to set two settings here, first one is the mousewheel.acceleration.start which defines the number of successive mouse scrolls that will trigger acceleration. Then, set mousewheel.acceleration.factor to how many times faster you want to scroll.

Mozilla Links states that a value of 3 for start and 5 for factor is pretty good, but again it depends on how much fast you want to scroll in Firefox.

We tried scrolling through the Google Reader pages and we found this factor to be really useful if the web pages have too small scroll bar.

Thanks to Mozilla Links for this tip.