Flash Mousewheel Scrolling on Mac OSX

Posted on 7 March, 2009 by shaun

Update: This was fixed and released in Player 10.0.42.34.. Woop! (Wed, 9 Dec, 2009)

Mousewheel scrolling is not properly supported by the Flash Player on Mac OSX. There is a bug in the Adobe bug tracker here:

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-503

But I feel that it’s misleading, and dilutes the issue. Firstly, the title has the word Flex in it. Secondly, it’s complaining about mousewheel support in Safari on Windows XP! Perhaps that is why it currently only has 10 votes.

The actual issue is that the mousewheel doesn’t work in any version of the Flash Player on OSX. It’s just a side-effect that it affects Safari on Windows.

This is a HUGE issue – Flash is all about Rich GUI these days, and OSX users are still without proper mouse support! How could this be an issue with only 10 votes?

At some point, the Flash Player will HAVE to support the Trackpad (with vertical and horizontal scrolling) properly, or risk continuing to look like a piece of ancient technology that doesn’t properly integrate with modern operating systems. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration: OSX users are generally very critical of UI nuances, and this is a biggie!

In the meantime there are a number of workarounds:

Update: The bug entry has been edited a little to better reflect the problem.
Update: This was fixed and released in Player 10.0.42.34.. Woop! (Wed, 9 Dec, 2009)

Posted in Banter | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

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  • Jake

    Hi, I tried the latest player 10.0.42.34 but still can't get the mouse wheel to work on a Mac. I couldn't find it mentioned in the release notes either. Care to explain how you got it to work?

  • http://shaun.boyblack.co.za/blog/ shaun

    Hi Jake, have a look at the Jira Bug: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-503

    Specifically these parts:

    Resolution: Fixed
    Fixed Version: Flash Player 10 – 10_0_42_34

    It's worth noting that it doesn't work in Firefox yet – it works in Safari and the standalone player.

  • jake

    Ah, so it only works in Safari. That explains it. Thanks!

  • Seb

    Hi, this bug is the most annoying thing I can think of!
    I'm on OsX 10.6.2, Safari 4.0.4, Flash Player 10.0.42.34 and scroll in my flashes DOES NOT work!?
    Is this really fixed, or something I'm missing?
    Thanks :)

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    Nice post there. Raised a few things to think about.