Simon Willison’s Weblog

Phoenix 0.5 and mouse gestures

8th December 2002

Phoenix 0.5 has been released, and so far it’s an absolute dream. The Windows installer is a paltry 6.1 MB and it is noticable faster than Phoenix 0.4—the initial speed boost was so impressive I spent several minutes loading up large, bloated sites just to admire the speed with which they appeared. The Phoenix team are aiming for a 5 MB Windows installer for the final release—here’s hoping they manage it.

Unfortunately there is still no menu option for the Mouse Gestures package to change the mouse button needed to trigger a gesture (it defaults to left but I much prefer right). If you want gestures to be linked to the right mouse button you’ll need to do the following:

1. Install the gestures package from here.
2. Restart Phoenix, then close it down again. This adds the default gestures preferences to your prefs.js file.
3. Open the Phoenix prefs.js file in a text editor. On Windows, you will find this in your Application Data file—mine (Win 98) is in C:\Windows\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\User\x2p6afl9.slt.
4. Find the line containing user_pref("mozgest.mousebutton", 0); and change the number to 2 (for right mouse button) or 1 (for middle mouse button).
5. Save the file, reload Phoenix and you’re done.