Program that allows you to scroll Google Chrome tabs using a mouse wheel.
Windows-only.
In action:
Tray menu (as of v2.0.0):
I got used to being able to scroll Chromium tabs using a mouse wheel on Linux, so much so that when I use Google Chrome on Windows I often catch myself trying to scroll tabs with a mouse wheel, obviously to no success, as Google Chrome doesn't support this on Windows. There are lot of browser extensions for scrolling tabs using a mouse wheel, many of which don't work or impose some weird requirements, like having the Alt key pressed in addition to using a mouse wheel in order to scroll the tabs. I got annoyed by all of this and just hacked together a simple AutoIt script, which you can see here.
Every time you scroll your mouse wheel the program kicks in, checks if the window directly under the mouse cursor is Google Chrome and if the mouse cursor is within the tabs area (the top part of the window), if so, it will emulate pressing Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown keys for mouse wheel up or mouse wheel down respectively. Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown are Google Chrome hotkeys/shortcuts for navigating to the previous and the following tabs.
- Download the executable from Releases
- Store it somewhere on your PC, e.g. Desktop or
%LocalAppData%folders - Throw a shortcut to it into the Startup folder. You can type
shell:startupinto Win+R to open the Startup folder
Alternatively, you can run the AutoIt script chrome-mouse-wheel-tab-scroller.au3 directly if you have AutoIt installed. You could even build the .exe yourself, as running .au3 directly won't set the tray icon. Throw it into Startup folder the same way and it should work.
This could happen in the previous versions of the program, but the newer versions (v1.0.0 and newer) have switched to using the Raw Input mouse capture method which shouldn't affect the mouse movement.
You can temporarily disable the program by left-clicking on its icon in the tray, or alternatively right-clicking and selecting "Disable". The tray icon will show a little red x symbol in a corner, signifying that the program is disabled.
Because the program runs with regular user's privileges, if the currently focused window is a privileged window, e.g. the Task Manager running as Administrator, Windows prevents the program from capturing the mouse input, so it doesn't know that you are scrolling the mouse wheel and thus is unable to function. To work around this, you can run the program as Administrator or just not have a privileged window being in focus.
Antiviruses might incorrectly flag the .exe as malicious, as AutoIt is often used by script kiddies and the way it creates .exe files is by combining AutoIt.exe and a script into a single .exe file, so all AutoIt .exes are very similar bit-wise and prone to false positives from antiviruses.
You don't have to trust my executable if you don't want to. As long as you trust the source code, you can install AutoIt and run the .au3 file directly, or build your own .exe out of it, which AutoIt makes very easy to do.
The application icon is a combination of:
chrome-mouse-wheel-tab-scroller.au3 -- GPL-3.0-only.
The icons are licensed differently.