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Disabling left-right (side) buttons on mouse entirely

A couple months ago I finally gave up my vintage bondi-blue puck mouse. I know many hated it, but I loved it. When I got my G4 700 MHz flatpanel iMac, I kept the puck mouse instead of the newer mouse. And then when I got my 2 GHz Intel Core 2 iMac, I still kept the puck mouse and left the "mighty mouse" in the wrapper.

A couple months ago, after using the "mighty mouse" at work for a while, I switched at home. It reads movement far more accurately, the left-right clicks are great, and the scroll/click ball at the middle is fantastic.

But the far left-right (side) buttons are a complete nightmare. I absolutely hate them. I'm constantly pressing them by accident. I had hoped that over time I'd get used to it and learn to work with them, but two months of using it hasn't changed a thing. I am constantly -- literally every few minutes -- getting unwanted, unintended clicks from the side buttons.

I want and need to disable them entirely.

I went to the mouse settings in System Preferences and switched those button settings to "off", but I still get unwanted clicks from the buttons a lot.

The worst problem is in Firefox. Clicking the side buttons causes Firefox to load the previous page from your browsing history, losing anything you were doing on the current page. I have lost countless -- probably around 100 -- emails and messages I was writing because an unwanted click took me away from the page I was composing on. The side button problems are annoying in other applications, but in Firefox they are a bloodpressure-boosting nightmare.

How do I disable the mighty mouse's two side-click buttons entirely?

G4 iMac 700MHz flatpanel "Tesserae", Mac OS X (10.4.11), Collection of old Macs from Mac 128 to G4 iMac!

Posted on Sep 28, 2008 5:03 PM

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7 replies

Sep 29, 2008 2:17 AM in response to Smaragd

Hi. The settings to switch off the side buttons are already built into OSX 10.4.11 System Preferences. Go to System Preferences>Keyboard and Mouse and select 'Off' in the dropdown on the schematic for the side buttons. Works for me without Steermouse. 😉

Good luck,

Adrian

Message was edited by Adrian: Obviously the Mighty Mouse has to be connected...

Sep 29, 2008 2:21 AM in response to Adrian Clarke1

As I mentioned, I already have set the side-click buttons to "off." I've had them "off" for a couple months, but it hasn't actually turned the buttons off. I still get unwanted clicks in various applications, the worst being Firefox.

I wish the mouse control panel in System Preferences worked as you'd expect. But clearly "off" doesn't really mean "off."

Sep 29, 2008 12:34 PM in response to Smaragd

Hi again, Sorry been out all day.

I haven't been able to find a .plist file specific to the mouse, or indeed keyboard & mouse. Trashing com.apple.systempreferences.plist in the Users>You>Library>Preferences folder seems a bit of a sledgehammer/walnut scenario 'though should do the trick. It'll mess up a few other Prefs that haven't got their own .plists...

I'd try changing the 'Off' to something else, logging out/in, changing it back to 'Off', log out/in again and see if that forces a rewrite of the relevant .plist file.

Also try the catch all troubleshooting 'plan' of seeing if the problem persists in another account - create one if you haven't got one.

Good luck and thanks for the star!

Adrian

Disabling left-right (side) buttons on mouse entirely

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