It can be turned off in the advanced options of Firefox but I can find no way to turn it off in Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer does lots of lame things. Why are you using it so much that you care about the middle click behavior?
Personally, I don’t want middle click to have standardized actions. My mom doesn’t even know it exists and I remap it to what I want it to do application by application (if it isn’t already mapped to something useful, that is, like MattF mentions). Things are just fine the way they are.
Should we also standardize 4th, 5th, 6th, etc buttons? My mouse has… let’s see… 12 buttons. All but the most basic 9$ logitech/microsoft mice have more then 3 buttons. Let’s just let the ‘power users’ who know what they’re doing map them to what they like and the rest continue along oblivious as usual.
You hope Apple and Microsoft will come to an agreement? What makes you think they will have anything to do with it (to say nothing of the free software world)?. I think it’ll carry on just like it has been; the application developers will decide what to do with middle button clicks. They’ll probably continue to be strongly associated with tabs, like you say, as developers use apps that reinforce this, and replicate similar behaviours in things they write.
The middle mouse button is something that has been in the back of my mind since I started using computers. You know it’s there, it should have a use, but it can never quite get fully taken advantage of. I’ve tried to attach uses to it over the years but, like you, until the tabbed applications came about never really made one use for it on all of my computers.
That “mighty mouse” looks like something from 1980. For all of their wonderful advancements in design, you’d think Apple could come out with something better looking than that.
As an XP, ubuntu, and solaris user, I find I’m often annoyed with the middle button not doing the autoscroll feature for me in solaris and Ubuntu, this is even worse because at work where I use solaris my mouse does not have the scroll wheel but just a middle button.
Another feature I have not seen in Firefox on Ubuntu or Solaris is that hitting the backspace button will go back a page, instead I believe it goes to the top of the page.
I am still new to the unix environment but I have already come to enjoy the benefits of middle click pasting, it is much simpler than highlighting, pressing ctrl+c then moving mouse to new spot ctr+v, (or using the actual copy and paste buttons themselves)
I’m pretty sure somebody has mentioned this above, but they may not come to an industry standard for the buttons for all OSs, but we can only hope that maybe cross platform applications will implement the same usage of the buttons to make switching among the OSs a much smoother user friendly transition.
P.S. As soon as I read the “middle click to close a tab” part this tab was promptly closed.
This goofy problem luckily sorta has a solution already: mice that have programmable buttons and application-sensitive settings.
This is a “solution” in the same way that the infinite configurability of Linux is a good desktop “solution”. There needs to be a standard default set of middle click behaviors driven from the top – eg, the OS, or at least the web browser which is effectively the OS for most people these days.
Overriding is always a possibility: heck, you can currently override left-click if you really wanted to.
That said, I’m seeing little to no consensus in this thread.
If you middle-mouse click a tab in Konqueror for KDE4, it tries to open the URL in the clipboard instead of closing the tab. I find this strange, as all other browsers I know of closes the tab with a middle-mouse click.
And the autoscrolling feature is great if you’re using a graphics tablet to browse the web!
On my computer pressing the middle mouse button opens a portal to a demonic underworld where I frolic among sinners and drink iced lattes with Beelzebub. Oh, and it’s good for gaming, also.
After reading this post, I opened the mouse panel and looked in the list to find something useful. I never looked in there really, but always felt like that button was useless.
Lately I have been developing reports for some of my applications and I believe I just found the greatest use for this middle button. In the list I have an item called “Precision Booster” and you choose a percentage of your pointer speed. I am now able to move all those items at really slow and precise speed while keeping my regular pointer speed for any other use.
So we have to standardize all the mouse buttons? What’s next, all of the function keys and keyboard shortcuts as well?
I find application specific functionality way too useful to give up. Not just middle click doing the best thing for the app in question, but also “hold left, click right”, “hold right, click left”, “hold right and scroll”, and the close tab gesture all save me tons of time in Firefox with the mouse gestures add on. Navigating GUI controls constantly is highly disruptive in comparison.
“Microsoft and Apple can decide on a set of standard middle mouse button behaviors”
Huh??? Microsoft and Apple decide??? Microsoft will propose one function, Apple will automatically propose something different. Users will go to war. CNN will do a story on Microsoft’s “unfair business practices”. Steve Jobs will have a temper tantrum and take two handicapped parking spots at Apple HQ for 2 straight weeks in “protest”. Apple lovers will label PC lovers “TROLLS” and vice-versa. And some kid will spend $200 for a 20-year-old Apple single button mouse, (STILL IN THE BOX!) take it out of the box … and hug it. And you will run a story on it - pictures and all.
This is all dependent on what you’re used to. And further, once you discover the middle-click capabilities of your system, any other system’s middle-click is likely to seem wrong.
I used Macs (one button) in the 80s, Windows 3.1 (two buttons!) in the early 90s, and Unix/Linux (three buttons!) starting in the mid-90s. The highlight-to-copy, middle-click-to-paste behavior of X was a wonderful discovery; when I don’t have it available it’s like I’m missing a finger.
Middle-clicking links predates tabs though; I remember middle-clicking links to open them in a new window.
One other feature now becoming common in the Unix/Linux world is middle-clicking on a non-link part of a web page to go to the URL that’s in the select buffer (clipboard). This is extremely handy, and follows logically from the traditional paste behavior.
This article is the first I’ve heard of middle-clicking on a tab to close it; it sounds wrong to me, but of course I’m biased as I’ve just described. In my world you close a tab by either left-clicking on a close button at the far right of the tab bar, or left-clicking on a close button on the tab itself.
And finally, yes I too am offended at the notion that Microsoft and Apple are the only ones who should be involved in any standardizing. A duopoly is little better than a monopoly. Of course, all the currently major GUI platforms (even Java) at least partly follow the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access"CUA/a standard, which was originally published by IBM in 1987.
I currently have a 5-button Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical. The thing I like most about it, in Windows anyway, is that the buttons can be configured for different things in different applications. So, in Visual Studio and Office apps, I have one of the side buttons copy and the other paste. And I have it set so clicking the middle button turns on Instant Viewer, an Expose-like feature under Windows.
But I do agree, a global convention needs to be established at least for the 3 default buttons, regardless of the OS/application being used.
And I intended to mention (but probably don’t need to) that I hate the middle-click scroll-lock too. But that’s mainly because it pops up when I intend to paste, and I have trouble turning it off.
Yes Joe Beam, when Unix/Linux and X came to PCs that only had two buttons, the both-buttons hack was invented to substitute for the middle button. Three-button mice were prized by the Unix-at-home crowd. Then scroll wheels came along and suddenly everyone had three buttons.
Actually, only the Windows version of Firefox has this modal autoscroll mode. On Linux, the middle button opens the page whose address is copied in the clipboard, which is very cool, because one can open a page whose URL is printed e.g. on the console just by selecting it and middle-clicking on Firefox.
It’s fine to me that every application defines whatever behaviour they want to the middle button, but it bothers me when the same program behaves differently across platforms.
I hate the single mouse button on my MacBook Pro, so I ended up getting a mighty mouse. The default button setup is guess what! one button. It’s not touch sensitive, it’s a pivot on either side. Sometimes it screws up and doesn’t right click.
UNIX/X11 before/outside of gnome/kde was the best text manipulation system out there (awk, sed, sort, uniq, grep, find…). The mouse behavior reflects this. When you throw in apps that support the C-x C-c C-v things get confusing when mixing the two methods. The worst part is that sometimes there were two different past buffers, one for highlighted text and one for C-c.
