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When scrolling using the mouse wheel scroll in Google Chrome, there is about 25% chance it would zoom in/out as if I have pressed the Ctrl key.

Disabling my mouse gesture extension reduces the chance to only about 2%.

I have tried various extensions and noticed some mouse gesture extensions seem to make it a bit worse than the others. I am guessing the problem is with Chrome or its extensions.

I believe it is not my hardware or software.

  1. It happens in Chrome on both my Windows 7 desktop computers at work and at home
  2. It never happens in Firefox on either computer (I use both browsers)
  3. I tried turning on "Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key" so I know if the Ctrl is pressed accidentally - it never was.
  4. I don't have AutoHotKey or anything similar installed on Windows.

Is this a Google Chrome bug? Is there a workaround?

UPDATE:
I installed AutoHotKey to nullify Ctrl+scroll.
Ctrl+scroll now does nothing, but scrolling normally still often zooms.

3

4 Answers

Dont know where from this problem comes. but we can have an alternative solution to that. Depending on the drivers for your mouse, you could set ctrl-scroll as a "shortcut" to actually do nothing - essentially capturing the combination and throwing it away. Some drivers will even let you specify this for only within a certain application, at which point you'd specify chrome.

OR

Another trick would be:

solution using AutoHotKey posted on google groups:

Using Logitech Performance Mouse MX...
Downloaded AutoHotKey software
In the AutoHotkey.ahk file, added these to do nothing for Cntrl+MouseWheelScrolling
^WheelDown::return
^WheelUp::return

Also if this doesn't work, please provide some more information about your hardware please..

UPDATE - The solution

It looks like the zooming issue is related to mouse scrolling freeware. I took a look at a tool I run called "WizMouse." The purpose of these tools is to allow scrolling windows without focusing on them. Settings can be changed in these to fix the problem.

Resolutions:

  • KatMouse (per nsx82): Add class: Chrome_WidgetWin_1, and under the settings tick option: "Window has scrolling wheel support?" (try checked first)
  • WizMouse (per JoPa Mi): Uncheck "Enable mouse wheel for applications without mouse wheel support"
6

I've been annoyed by this for a long time, but when I searched most recently, I found a Chrome Extension that disables this Ctrl-scroll zoom behavior called No MouseWheel Zoom.

It worked fairly well, but didn't do exactly what I wanted (I wanted scrolling to continue as usual, even if I had pressed Ctrl. The extension just stopped scrolling and zooming altogether when Ctrl was pressed). So, I decided to make my own extension, which I just published yesterday. It converts Ctrl-scroll back into normal scrolling, and it's called ZoomToScroll.

Check these two extensions out and see if either one of them does what you want.

1

Here's an AutoHotKey script that will remove the Ctrl+Wheel gesture from just Chrome and leave it for other appliations:

;Disable mouse wheel zooming in Chrome
#IfWinActive, ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1 ^WheelDown::return
#IfWinActive, ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1 ^WheelUp::return

Another workaround: this extension disables page zooming in general, unless/until enabled for specific tabs:

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