My Geekdom

Grab and Drag, a Firefox Extension, takes scrolling and turns it on its head. Before I explain what it is, let me explain what it is not. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the little hand cursor in Adobe Reader that allows you to click on a portion of the page and move the page around. Basically this feature is as electronic version of putting your hand on a piece of paper on a table and moving it around. While Grab and Drag has a hand cursor and allows you to move the contents of the screen around, it is definitely not the same feature as that offered in Adobe Reader.

For starters, Grab and Drag has a multiplier. This allows you to set, you guessed it, a multiplier for the page movement. For example, if the multiplier is set to 2, then for every pixel that you move the cursor vertically, the page moves 2 pixels. Similarly for horizontal movement. The multiplier can take a value between 0.1 for those times when you want to be scrolling a pixel at a time and your hand is a bit shaky (or, more likely, your mouse needs a cleaning) to 8 which allows you to scroll through almost any web page in a single movement from the bottom of the page to the top (ie: you move the mouse 1 screen and web page scrolls through 8). I like to keep mine around 5.5 for quick scrolling.

Besides the multiplier, it has a feature called "flick". This allows you to push down the mouse button and give the mouse a filck to enable one of four operations. You can either do a scroll one page up or down (depending on the direction of your flick), or a scroll to the top or bottom of the page. As an aside to the functionality provided by Grab and Drag, I must mention that, while not one for esthetics, Grab and Drag is darn pretty. By default it never scrolls and comes to a jarring halt. It scrolls and then slowly decelerates to a stop. This is, of course, customizable in its well-designed control panel.

Well, having saved the best for last, Grab and Drag has a feature called momentum. As you have probably guessed, if you grab the page, move it, and let go in a motion bigger than a flick, it starts scrolling and keeps scrolling. It will stop when you grab the page again, when it reaches the top or the bottom of the page, or, if you have set up friction, it slows down and eventually comes to a stop potentially before the top or bottom of the page. I use this feature just all the time. The trouble is, it does not work in any other application (eg: Adobe Reader, Word, etc...). While it is not a big deal in terms of functionality, Grab and Drag only works on the page portion of Firefox. This leads to me routinely flicking my bookmark window or some other window that just does not respond the way I want it to :-)

Grab and Drag has some features to make it work with a tablet or other touch-screen enabled computer. It even has a You Tube video showing how cool it is. That being said, I don't have a touch-screen computer (excluding my Treo, of course) and hence do not care about these features.

In summary, Grab and Drag presents several twists on scrolling that I have never seen before. Furthermore, it does it with such skill and elegance that I'm totally hooked.

PS: If you wish you can download a slightly older version of Grab and Go from the Mozilla website. Extensions there to be a bit behind the Mozdev site but Mozilla takes time to certify them, hopefully producing greater confidence in their quality.