Back in August I complained of a mysterious Firefox scrolling problem several of you were kind enough to make suggestions. In the meanwhile, infuriatingly intermittently, I have been driven almost to the verge of Google Crome or Microsoft IE or Gengis Kahn Browse It My Way or some other hegemonic browser ;) as my dear and richly pimped Firefox kept turning scrolling into a bizarre and random experience.

Now, at length, after patient and impatient waiting, much searching of soul and the Mozilla help pages, a great and powerful wizard named Testpattern has enlightened me as to the true cause of my problems, and all is fixed :)

It was, apparently, the carrots! The Firefox is a vegetarian beast and it seems eats carrots. Pressing F7 turns "carrot browsing" on and off. F7 is curiously close on my keyboard to F8, and F8 is the magic key that starts ScribeFire and allows me to compose blog posts and web pages, while avoiding the dreaded Blogger eternal wait for publishing, or make notes to self. So, cutting to the chase, F8 gets pressed a lot, and so F7 gets pressed quite a bit by accident ;) When I accidentally pressed F7 I cut off the supply of carrots to the Firefox and in a fit of hungry pique she ruined my scrolling experience.

So thank you Testpattern, and Stanberka if you are still reading, our problem is solved. To J. P. van de Giessen and Bob MacDonald thank you for your suggestions but it required a higher magic that of which rank beginners like you are yet apt ;)

PS: if anyone is still reading Caret Browsing (so named, the oracle sayeth, because it is supposed to turn the cursor into a caret or ^ symbol, but doesn't on my computer leaving the cursor as a standard |) is a really useful feature which "allows you to navigate a web page just as you would in a word processor" except it doesn't, since CTRL and Arrow Key combinations do not work, and plain vanilla Shift Arrow Key highlights text anyway...

So now my question to all wizards and computer geeks is: is there any way to disable Caret Browsing or at least the F7 trick? I am loath to map F7 to null or some such trick since other programs sometimes have a real use for this key.