A Question About Safari

[Roshi]

Terri O, I hope this is the right forum.

I have a tiny question about Safari, Apple's web browser. Why can't I (or how can I) use the scroll wheel of my mouse?
Sorry if that disturbs the scientific flux of questions specific to that forum but it's the only one that came to my mind...

 

[David cgc]

There shouldn't be any special trick. The only possible thing I can think of is that the cursor needs to be on top of the window you want to scroll in the latest version of Mac OS X.

Are you using Safari for Mac or Windows? Does your scroll wheel work properly in other programs?

 

[Jadzia]

is this a generic usb mouse? OSX might need an update if the scroll wheel works with no software. Else the mouse might not be osx compatible. Or the mouse is broken... could be lots of things :-)

 

[TerriO]

Terri O, I hope this is the right forum.

Exactly the right forum.

My Mac experience is limited to trackpad use, so I'm going to have to let one of our resident Mac experts do their usual great job at this one.

 

[Roshi]

Thanks! As a matter of fact the scroll function works perfectly. What I should have mentioned earlier is the click function of the wheel scroll does not work. And yes, I'm using Safari for Windows at work. There's a familiarity so close to iTunes that I think it's easier to use and it's eye-candy.

 

[Verteron]

Thanks! As a matter of fact the scroll function works perfectly. What I should have mentioned earlier is the click function of the wheel scroll does not work. And yes, I'm using Safari for Windows at work. There's a familiarity so close to iTunes that I think it's easier to use and it's eye-candy.

Mac OS X doesn't have the "click and scroll" function that Windows has. At a guess I'd say that because of the way Safari was ported from OS X to Windows, it doesn't support this on either platform.

Unfortunately Apple hasn't done a massively good job "Windowsizing" Safari; it still looks and acts much like an OS X application with its own font rendering and scrolling behaviour and so on, obviously this is not ideal for those using the browser on Windows, but I think you just have to live with its quirks until Apple themselves improve matters.

Which might be never, as part of the reason for them porting Safari is to attract people to the OS X platform and its superior eye candy and intuitiveness, or something...