Is there a way to lower how sensitive the zooming function is for web sites in which scrolling accomplishes zooming in and out?
Scrolling is most useful for going up and down in text and that works fine, but when the same mouse gesture gets exploited to zoom in and out, it is perhaps ten times too sensitive to be useful. The smallest motions I can do with my hand are still too big.
I can adjust mouse sensitivity on my computers but it’s impractical to shift that up and down each time I use the scrolling function.
I’m thinking specifically of a scroll wheel on a Windows PC mouse, and the two fingered scrolling gesture on a Mac Magic Trackpad. But I don’t think my problem is hardware user settings as the scrolling function is fine when reading text, which is by far its most frequent use. Maps.google.com is an example of a web site that is too sensitive (with Chrome or Internet Explorer or Safari), but I use several mapping web sites and all seem similarly difficult.
Scroll to zoom is sort of a hack. Before pinch to zoom before a thing, computer mice were designed with specific “notches” on the wheel that translated to a certain number of lines per notch (usually 3 lines of text on Windows, I think). This lack of precision was translated directly to Google Maps, I guess, without insufficient “dampening”… I always wondered why they didn’t make the zoom smoother too (I think Bing’s by default is much slower?). Ended up just using the plus and minus signs on the zoom slider for finer control. Kinda sucks, yeah.
PS, as an aside, the next time you buy a laptop consider a touch-screen one. Precision zooming via touch to zoom completely changed my opinion of them from “useless novelty” to “wow, I don’t know how I ever lived without this”.
