I use a laptop. Not a mac, but with a multitouchpad so I scroll down and right click with 2 fingers still.

I hate the fact that if I move too much my fingers over tabs, the scroll will but activated and it will switch to another tab (pretty randomly since my scroll was unintended). It can sometimes be difficult to find my tab bacK.

Is there a way to disable this behaviour? In general, Chrome seems very minimalistic in terms of behaviour customization ...

Someone had the problem on Firefox, which I actually don't have there: How can I disable mouse wheel scrolling of Firefox tabs? Maybe this extension could help, but I have a negative feeling about it. Somebody uses it? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shortcut-manager/mgjjeipcdnnjhgodgjpfkffcejoljijf

I'm using Chrome 30.0.1599.101 in Lubuntu 13.10.


  • Scrolling over the tabs in Chrome doesn't switch tabs by default. See superuser.com/questions/504687/… for reference – Der Hochstapler Jan 30 '14 at 12:18
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    @OliverSalzburg it does on the Ubuntu version, this used to drive me crazy with a trackpad but I don't use Linux any more. I never found a solution but this was a long time ago now. – zelanix Jan 30 '14 at 13:16
  • I hope you haven't left Linux for this. It would be sad! But at least if it was an option, it means they asked themselves if it made sense or not. And as every option, some people like it, some don't... I'll keep searching the web – Augustin Riedinger Jan 30 '14 at 15:40
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    Has anyone found a solution to the problem yet? I just installed Linux Mint and it's already starting to get annoying – rink.attendant.6 Sep 22 '14 at 9:57
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    This 'feature' has been in Chrome/Chromium since 2008. For 7 years it has haunted, taunted and annoyed Linux users. It's still going strong. – Mave Jun 4 '15 at 11:24

As of today this is built-in functionality within Chrome GTK/Linux only. Here is the key thread discussing the change: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1316

Windows users must use Chrome Toolbox (by Google) or an alternate solution. Unfortunately this extension and its control options aren't available on Chrome Linux's latest versions due to the drop for NPAPI support, as mentioned in the extension FAQ.

As a result, the only option I see is to pull down the source code for Chrome and modify the source, which I've done personally to make tweaks. It's not that hard to do and would be the route I would take. For this particular feature, I would simply undo / rollback the following change and recompile:


If you click the "View" link under the column Side-by-side diffs and change the files to match the red version (old), that should essentially do the trick. Sorry this is technical in nature, but it would certainly solve the problem. Alternative suggestions welcome.


The issue is still here. :(

My guess is that this feature is not even usable.

Let's verify this: please downvote this answer if you actually use this feature.

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