Nowadays, all Mouse come with 3 buttons. The Left Click, right Click and the middle button called Mouse Scroll Button. Many people do not know that the Scroll button or the scroll wheel – as it is popularly known, can be used for different purposes. This posts describes the various uses of the Mouse Scroll Button.
Closing Browser tabs
Consider you have multiple tabs open in your browser. If you want to close the tabs, you need to go to the tab to bring the tab in focus and then click the X mark on the tab and then the tab closes. One of the best uses of the Mouse Scroll Button is to close the browser tab quickly. Just take the mouse pointer to the tab and click the Mouse middle button on the tab and the tab is closed ! This is applicable for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox as well.
Opening a link in a new tab
Another useful way of using the Mouse scroll button is to use it to open the link in a new tab. We use the CTRL + Left Key or right click and select a option to open the link in new tab. Instead of using this, you can click the mouse scroll button on the link and the link will open in the new tab. Again this is the best and the easiest way to open the link in a new tab using the Mouse Middle Button. This is applicable for Internet explorer as well as Mozilla Firefox.
Opening the Stored favorites link in a new tab
If you have stored all your favorite links in a folder, you can instantly open all the links in that folder in a new tab by clicking the Mouse middle button on that folder. This way you can very easily save your time.
Scrolling the document manually
This is one of the more known use of the Mouse Scroll Wheel. If a document is big enough and has multiple pages, you can easily scroll the document by moving the Mouse Scroll wheel. If you scroll the wheel then the page will move accordingly.
Scrolling the document automatically.
If you are reading a document and do not want to continuously keep using your mouse to scroll the pages , then you can automatically scroll the pages by using the Mouse Scroll wheel. To achieve this follow the below steps
- Open the browser page or the document you want to scroll.
- Click on the Mouse Scroll Button
- A Circle symbol with 2 arrows as shown below will be displayed will be displayed . Now you can move the mouse cursor to set the scrolling speed. The scrolling speed will increase or decrease based on the cursor movement of the mouse.
Mouse Scroll Speed Option
- Once the desired scrolling pace is achieved , you can leave the mouse and browse the document. The document scrolls automatically !
Since the Mouse scroll Wheel is such a useful button, Windows operating system offers different ways to change the parameters of the button and adjust the Scroll Speed and scroll Lines. You can use the mouse setting to achieve this. Change Mouse Settings post describes the detail instruction on how to achieve this.
The Mouse scroll wheel might not work smoothly. Refer to the Post ‘Mouse Scroll Wheel not working’ to check the various reasons behind it and the procedure to resolve it.
Refer the post ‘Disable Mouse Scroll wheel’ if you want to disable the Mouse scroll wheel completely.
Now that you understand the many different uses of the Mouse Scroll button, you can use this button in a more effective way.