Firefox on Mac tip for trackpad users

Oct 29, 2026

In Firefox on Mac, if you double tap to zoom (smart zoom) on something (for example, a column of text), by default, and unlike Safari, the scrolling is very “loose,” making it very difficult to scroll in a straight line. But if you change `apz.axis_lock.mode` to `1` in the advanced settings (`about:config`), it makes the scrolling very stable, linear, at least as much as Safari, maybe more. But the option should really be in the regular settings.

(The default is `2`; change it to `3`, and, counter-intuitively, it’s looser than `1`, but tighter than `2`.)

But it could be worse, not only is the default scrolling in Chrome loose, with, to my knowledge, no way to tighten it, but Chrome still doesn’t smart zoom text correctly on Mac. It leaves the column with no margin or padding.

Firefox’s loose scrolling was, apparently, a fairly recent change emulating Chrome. What doesn’t quite make sense to me, is Chrome’s shipped a CSS setting to disable scroll locking (disable stable linear scrolling in favor of loose diagonal scrolling), with only two values `auto` and `none`. Meaning the browser default or loose. That would make a lot more sense with a default of `lock` (`1`), or if it were about letting the user set the default, but appears to be more of an attempt to work around Safari. But it’s not surprising if Chrome devs never zoom in on columns of text.

(Note: Firefox is changing something related to this in 161 [currently, 159], but it appears to be in the direction of looseness. I tried it in Nightly 161 and detected no difference, but it’s possible it hasn’t landed here yet.)

But if you haven’t tried Firefox in a while, it’s gotten kind of good (at least relative to other browsers). I think it has the best version of vertical tabs, and its (new) compact mode has more vertical space than Safari’s. If they fixed a fullscreen with hidden toolbars bug, I’d be pretty happy with it (relatively). Safari still has an advantage by being able to access the address bar and favorites with one shortcut, Command-L, though. And I’m quite fond of the WebKit blog, whereas the Mozilla blog is …