The Racing Geek

I recently switched to a new unibody Macbook Pro and while I love the keyboard and the battery life I have had major issues with the multitouch keypad. My usual method for using the trackpad on the old Macbook was to rest my thumb on the button while using my index finger to move the cursor. On the new buttonless Macbook the computer keeps interpreting that as a two-finger pinc zoom and as a result I keep resizing my brower text every 15 minutes or so. Unfortunately Apple in its infinite Jobs-ian wisdom has decided that no one will ever want to live without this feature which means that there is no official way to turn it off from within system preferences. So after a bunch of searching though various forums I’ve stumbled across this method to disable the two finger pinch zoom feature within Firefox. This will require changing the firefox config file to use at your own risk:

1) Open Firefox
2) Type in “about:config” in the address bar and hit enter
3) Hit the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to get into the actual config
4) Type “gesture” in the “filter” field. This should give you a list of all the supported gestural interactions
5) Double-click on “browser.gesture.pinch.in” and delete the value in the text box that pops up.
6) Repeat for “browser.gesture.pinch.out”
7) Close the tab and you no longer have to deal with inadvertant pinch-zooms in Firefox

This will only affect html pages within firefox. Other mac applications will still have the pinch-zoom feature as will PDF files you open within Firefox using the PDF plugin.