Firefox Scrolling Problem

My main annoyance with firefox (besides the slowness) has been it’s refusal to follow convention and allow me to scroll pages with the spacebar. I’ve looked over hints and hacks and extensions and preferences to no avail. Trying again today I stumbled upon the solution …

Parableman: Firefox Scrolling Problem:

So I looked through every option in the various menus Firefox has, and only two seemed to have to do with scrolling. Neither changed anything. I even looked through the help file to see if these two functions were supposed to do something that they weren’t doing. No, they did things that were unrelated to my problem. In the process I did notice something else strange. It listed Page Up and Page Dn as moving to the top and bottom of a web page. They didn’t do that. They moved to the end of whatever lin I was on. That should have been a clue. A little later I noticed that when I clicked on parts of a page with no text the browser was acting as if I had clicked on a line with text. That was clue #2, and I reminded me of a menu option that I had dismissed as irrelevant, which turned out to be exactly the problem.

So here is the solution: Under Options, select the Advanced tab. Accessibility Options will appear. Under Accessibility Options, one choice says “Allow text to be selected with the keyboard”. That option was checked. I unchecked it, and the problem was solved. Now I can use my spacebar to scroll down web pages.