Enable Smooth Scrolling in Firefox to Dramatically Improve Web Browsing
Firefox is a great web browser but it has a few quirks that make it a less than ideal browser for OS X Lion and Mountain Lion users. A major issue is scrolling performance, which can stutter or appear slow and clunky, it’s noticeable enough that certainly anyone who has used Firefox in Mac OS X has experienced it before. Here’s the strange part, it’s completely remedied with a preference setting that is buried away:
- Open Preferences from the Firefox menu
- Click on “Advanced” and under ‘General’ check the box next to “Use smooth scrolling”
Now try scrolling up or down in a lengthy browser window to experience the perfectly smooth scrolling that is standard in other web browsers, the difference is night and day.
The big question of course is this: why on earth isn’t this enabled by default in Firefox? With smooth scrolling enabled, Firefox does use slightly more CPU only when scrolling pages, but it’s certainly not egregious enough to warrant disabling by default except perhaps on the oldest of Macs with limited resources.
Anyway, enjoy your newly improved Firefox browser and don’t miss some other Firefox tips. Heads up to ZeroDistraction for pointing out this little fluke.