Reclaim two-finger scrolling in Firefox

One annoying feature of Firefox that has contributed to my premature balding is "mouse shortcuts," a set of gestures and shortcuts that, amongst other things, enables a forward/back function to be invoked with nothing more than your mouse. If you're a PowerBook owner and love two-finger scrolling like me, you might also be losing some hair over these mouse shortcuts as they all-too-often contribute to the obliteration of an email, forum or blog draft because Firefox move forward/back instead of scrolling like it should. (By the way: owners of a PowerBook or iBook that doesn't have the two-finger scrolling option, you can check out this post to find out how to enable it.)

If you're nodding your head right now, fear Firefox's mouse shortcuts no more: I finally found the answer, with instructions, in a Mozilla forum thread. It's possible to disable just the right features to reclaim two-finger scrolling in all directions in Firefox, you just can't do it through the preferences window. For those who might not know: Firefox has a config file you can open in the browser to adjust a lot of settings you can't touch elsewhere, and here's how: type about:config into Firefox's address bar. This opens up a whole list of options you can mess around with, but we only need two:

Find (or filter) mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines

Double click it and change it to false. Then find:

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines

Change this to the opposite of its current setting, i.e. – if it's -1 (like mine was) change it to 1. The new settings should kick in immediately, so you should now be able to scroll in every direction, worry free.