Scrolling with arrow keys no longer works
This article describes how to fix a problem in Firefox, Mozilla Suite or SeaMonkey, where you are not able to scroll through web pages when you press the arrow keys. If the scroll bar is gone, see Scrollbar gone instead.
You may have inadvertently enabled Caret Browsing, which is turned on and off by pressing the F7 key. When Caret Browsing is on, web pages act like word processor documents, with a blinking vertical bar that shows you where you are in the document. To turn Caret Browsing off, press F7. [1]
To prevent people from accidentally turning on Caret Browsing when pressing F7, the application will show a confirmation dialog:
If you see this dialog and you do not want to turn on Caret Browsing, click No.
If you selected "Do not show this dialog again", you can bring back this warning dialog by setting the preference accessibility.warn_on_browsewithcaret to true:
- Type about:config in the Location Bar.
- Press Enter.
- Find the preference name accessibility.warn_on_browsewithcaret.
- Double click on it to set it to true.
To reduce such problems in the future, you can add the following in your user.js file so that every session begins with Caret Browsing off and the warning dialog enabled.
// Get SpaceBar, PageUp, PageDown to work properly if F7 hit accidentally
user_pref("accessibility.browsewithcaret", false);
user_pref("accessibility.warn_on_browsewithcaret", true);
