Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Windows Mobile 5: How do I modify the default scrolling behaviour of Web browsers?

Windows Mobile 5 (WM5 for short) users may have noticed that the default scrolling behaviour of Internet Explorer Mobile (IEM for short) has been modified to make it possible for touchscreen-less (say, Microsoft Smartphone) users to navigate over links. That is, if you press up or down on the D-pad (direction pad) of your Pocket PC, only the next link will be highlighted, not the entire page scrolled. This is diametrically opposed to the approach of earlier operating system versions and can be really frustating for people that would like to scroll one page at a time, without needing to keep track where they were.
It's for them that I've written this step-by-step tutorial discussing all the available Pocket PC Web browsers and the ways of making them scroll one page at a time via the D-pad. Hope they'll find the tutorial useful.

Internet Explorer Mobile
You'll need some registry hacking to switch back to the normal scrolling mode. Get a registry editor (I recommend Resco Registry Editor but you can choose any other, WM5-compliant one; please see
this roundup of the available and WM5-compliant registry editors if you want to choose one).
Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ Software\ Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Navigation\4-Way Nav] and change its value from 1 to 0.
Alternatively, if you don't want to directly edit the Registry, you can use a third-party application like Tweaks2k2 to do the trick: navigate to Tweaks/Internet Tricks and enable "PIE Smooth Scrolling".

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