craniac's place » Google

HELP NEEDED: Mouse wheel vs. keyboard

Steve Crane — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:15:45 +0000

I recently switched the default browser on all my machines from Firefox to Google Chrome. In general I’m loving Chrome but there is one behaviour that is driving me nuts. Scrolling with the mouse wheel takes keyboard focus away from the document.

Here’s what happens. I’ve just opened a page and can use the keyboard up/down and PgUp/PgDn keys to scroll it; no problem there. But if I then use the wheel on my mouse to scroll the page, it loses the keyboard focus and no longer responds to up/down, PgUp/PgDn, or in fact any other keyboard keys. I have to click on the page background to restore the keyboard focus. This is a minor inconvenience for scrolling but where it really drives me nuts is in Google Reader and Gmail where I use shortcuts a lot. Here I find that I scroll the article or e-mail I’m reading with the mouse wheel then get no response when I press j/k to move to the next or previous article or e-mail.

I would be eternally grateful if anyone can provide me with a solution to this problem.

UPDATE: Problem solved. There is apparently a bug in Chrome that cause some incompatibility with mouse wheel extenders such as KatMouse, which I use. Rob Boek has documented a workaround, where changing some settings in KatMouse solves the problem.

New features in Google Reader

Steve Crane — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:10:07 +0000

According to the latest post on the Official Google Reader Blog the feature I spotted yesterday is now live; new/unread message counts now go to 1000 instead of 100, so you will no longer see 100+ on your tags. If you see 1000+ on anything other than your All Items folder then you probably need to unsubscribe from some feeds or reconsider your strategy for reading feeds.

The other new feature that has been added is a search that you can use to search all your subscriptions. I know many have been asking for this and it should prove most useful.

The 100+ is back

Steve Crane — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:22:44 +0000

Earlier at home I was seeing actual unread message counts in Google Reader but now I’m logged in at work and I’m seeing the familiar old 100+ for tags with more than a hundred new posts. “They’re coming to take me away, ha ha, hee, hee!”

Google Reader loses the 100+

Steve Crane — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:54:03 +0000

Cool, I just noticed that Google Reader has had a little update and no longer displays 100+ when there are over a hundred new posts in a tag. My All Items is currently showing 904 unread.

WTF is up with Google?

Steve Crane — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 14:06:56 +0000

I just launched a Google search from the Firefox search bar and was presented with a screen like this.

After entering the CAPTCHA code I saw a message about being redirected, but simply came back to the page above. Thinking it may be related to using the Firefox search bar I went to the Google home page and searched from there. Again I got the CAPTCHA but this time the code was accepted when I entered it and I got my search results. I hope that this is not something we will see every time we do a search from now on.