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Thanks to a quick tip by Google’s own +François Beaufort, we now know that reverse mouse scrolling is available in Chrome OS Canary Channel at the moment.
As we’ve seen before, these types of features can move down through development channels pretty quickly, so we may see this available sooner rather than later on more stable builds of the OS.
Similar to “Australian Scrolling” for the trackpad, this feature affects the scroll wheel on attached mice.
I don’t know about you, but this has always been a bit of a head-scratcher for me. I prefer my trackpad scrolling to move the same direction as my hand. So, when I move from the top to the bottom of my trackpad, I expect the page I’m seeing to do the same. Almost like having a piece of paper under your fingers.
In my head, it is no different than scrolling on the touch screen. The movement of the page follows the movement of my fingers.
For some reason, my brain has never worked this way for mouse wheel scrolling. And, to be honest, I’m not sure why. I remember reversing scroll direction on a windows machine once and just couldn’t get used to it. Maybe it is just hard to undo years of training, but when I roll the scroll wheel away from myself, I expect to scroll up the page.
Perhaps after some trial and error, I may like this. You might, too. Either way, it’s another option for users and that in and of itself is a win.
