GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 731800
detail "zoom" scroll-mode is too easy to accidentally enable
Last modified: 2014-09-25 23:02:14 UTC
I constantly activate the detail scroll on accident, am I the only one? (When using the scrollbar with the mouse instead of a scroll wheel due to lack of a wheel) When I scroll through large 90+ documents with mouse held down and scanning for stuff, and slowing down at various sections to read if I arrived at what I wanted to see (without releasing the mouse) I *constantly* activate the detail scroll mode. It feels like you sprinted nicely through the town, slowed down to look at nice flowers and when you want to take up speed again and suddenly you're helplessly struggling without getting forward = worst. feeling. ever. It is literally the worst user experience I ever had with a scroll bar, really frustrating to use. Practically it also leads to a lot of time loss since I am constantly thrown out of the scanning to deal with this and can't get a fast overview over the document as I wanted to do. So is that only me? What about allowing to turn this off?
The drag and drop of my buttons is sometimes unreliable which leads me to believe that the buttons might sometimes register a short mouse release when there was none. However, I have no idea how often that happens. Generally I don't have any notable issues (unlike this scroll bar stuff).
What would be full steps to reproduce (step by step) if I wanted to try? Which GTK+ version is this about?
Steps to reproduce: 1. Open a 90+ page document in evince (I use version 3.10.3) 2. Click the scroll button and hold down the mouse 3. Scroll like a larger amount of pages (10-20 pages) and then slow down on a page to a halt while still holding the mouse button 4. Look on the page, maybe you would also unintentionally wiggle the mouse a bit 5. Take up speed again and scroll down another 10-20 pages Expected result: Step 5 works, always. Actual result: By Step 5, in 1 out of 5 times roughly, I'm now stuck in that detail scroll mode all of a sudden and I can't get away. I need to release the mouse, then shift my eye focus from the document to the scroll bar at the side, move the mouse cursor onto the scroll grabber again, mouse down and only now I can actually look at the document again and resume my search. GNOME Version: 3.10.2 GTK+ version: 3.10.9 as packaged by Fedora 20/x86_64
This problem is not theoretical. I am a university student and I need to read a lot of documents and my Linux laptop has been my device of choice until the GNOME version came along that introduced this. Now I prefer using my windows desktop because I JUST CAN'T SCROLL PROPERLY. This is as bad of a problem as it sounds. Please do something about it. At least add a dconf switch to turn this broken feature off.
Te case where this is, as I have been told, supposed to kick in doesn't work for me either: sometimes I start scrolling very slowly to still read something on the page, then want to speed up and - oh wait I can't, I am in detail scroll mode now and need to release and re-click first. (and starting out with scrolling slowly is what this was actually made for I heard?) So I don't know if this works better with touch, or whatever other devices, or whether some people love it and it works for them, but for me this is a major deal breaker. All I ask for is, at least provide some obvious way to turn it off.
I got different hardware now (ThinkPad X220 instead of ThinkPad X121E) and still the same issue. Is finally someone going to look at it?
Related blog post talking about the feature: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2013/08/05/scrolling-in-gtk/
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 728739 ***