It’s frustrating to me that millions and millions of mice have shipped with this button, and yet it’s a total crapshoot what will happen when you press the middle mouse button in any given application under any operating system. If the first and second mouse buttons have standard, well-defined meanings today-- why can’t the third button, too?
Maybe it would be valuable to compare the behavior of the function keys (F1 through F12) to the mouse buttons. I’ll stick to Windows for this analogy, since that’s what I’m most familiar with.
In 99% of Windows apps, Alt+F4 closes the current application. In 99% of applications that support a Help feature, F1 brings up Help. Most or all of the other function keys, though, have no standard behavior across all applications; their behavior is application-defined.
Maybe it’s okay for the mouse to behave this way, too? Well-defined standard functionality for some buttons (left-click, right-click); application-specific functionality for others?
I like the middle click to paste behaviour also very much and miss it, when not in an X environment. I agree that everyone has their own taste and probably likes that behaviour the most which someone has got used to or grew up with.
In my case, I was initially a Windows user and switched some years ago to an X based desktop. Interestingly, on Windows, there isn’t really such a standardized behaviour for the MMB as it is in the X Window System, so it didn’t really feel wrong, because there was nothing I was much used to.
The paste behaviour is especially useful in terminals, where CTRL-C always means sending a signal to the currently running process to terminate, so CTRL-C CTRL-V for copy and paste isn’t possible. The problem with the different contents one gets when using middle click or CTRL-V for pasting ist just that middle click always uses the current session wide selection (which means you can’t paste some text over some other text by selecting it, because it would just paste what you just selected) and CTRL-V uses what was recently stored by CTRL-X or CTRL-C.
I think standardizing the 3rd button behaviour for all platforms doesn’t make sense because the platforms in itself are just so different that you just can’t find a solution which would work well on all platforms.
I don’t like the auto scroll system. It has too poor sense of control of the scrolling movement. If it was more robust, then I would maybe use it more. Now it feels like the web page moves uncontrolled here and there. This is because the stopping of the scrolling occurs only at an so small area with the mouse pointer. Plus the cross of death icon should vanish and the auto scrolling cease when I take the mouse pointer away from the cross far enough to left or right.
It seems like they invented the auto scroll system and considered it something cool, but then forgot to do proper usability tests for it.