How long have I been using PC’s??? Not long enough as I discovered a nifty shortcut today that I have never used before with my Microsoft® Trackball Optical Mouse.

I’d like to know who else uses this mouse (though I am sure any mouse with a scroll wheel will also accomplish this shortcut), and knew of the trick.

If you hover over a live link (in my case it was a picture with a link), you can click using the scroll wheel of the mouse and it will launch the target into a new tab (I use FF3).

How cool is that!! It is perfect for my website timsdigitasldarkroom.com, as I was previously having to open pictures on at a time since there is a no right click on my gallery pages. Now I can just scroll click and go!

Sweet!

I thought I broke my FireFox today.

I had to reinstall Firefox 3.0.1 (a weird oversight on my part).

Once I did that I noticed that java/java-script features on various websites no longer worked!!

So for instance:

1. when I hit anything in the post formatting boxes on a vBulletin forum (like the smileys) nothing happened, or
2. when I hit a link @ Photrade that said javascript:void(0) nothing happened.
3. Trying to use the “multi-quote” feature @ http://forums.digitalpoint.com/ also was broken.

I thought what the heck did I do! I had java & JS enabled in FF.

I restarted FF, rebooted… nothing doing in any case.

Then I go to wondering…had anything else changed today besides my reinstall of FF….YES!!!

There were 9 Microsoft XP “security” updates today!

I tried removing all of them and everything was back to normal!!!

So I’m off…off to see which one was the culprit! If anyone find it before me, comment and let me know as I won’t bother investigating it tonight…just releived I found the culprit!

Thanks MicroSoft!