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WizMouse enables you to mouse-scroll all windows

When I write a new article I tend to have two browser windows aligned next to each other that span the whole screen. One displays the WordPress admin dashboard, the other is used for research while I write the article.

This can be a quick word look up on a dictionary site like Leo.org, a program web page, or a web forum where a related topic is discussed.

Most of the time, I have to scroll to read all contents. With the dashboard active, I have to click to activate the other browser window before I can scroll, since you can only do so on the active window in Windows by default.

That's where a program like WizMouse comes into play. Created by Antibody Software, makers of the excellent Bulk Image Downloader, it removes the active window restriction from the operating system.

What this means is that once it is up and running it is possible to scroll any visible window on the screen regardless of whether it is active or not.

wizmouse

This can be mighty useful for some users since you save clicks every time you need to scroll a window that is not active.

While that is great in itself, WizMouse comes with another feature that some users may find useful.  You can enable support for applications that don't support mouse wheels.

This means that you can use the mouse wheel to scroll in those applications even if they don't support that natively. The developer notes that this is experimental and may not work in all applications. He recommends to disable it if you notice "strange mouse wheel behavior" in applications after enabling it.

Apart from that, you find a couple of additional settings in the program options. You can set it to run with elevated privileges so that you can scroll windows that were started with administrative privileges, bring windows that you scroll to the foreground automatically, or reverse the mouse scrolling.

Conclusion

WizMouse worked fine with all windows that I tried it on. While that is the case, it is likely that you may encounter windows that it won't work with properly.

The program itself runs hidden in the background, and since it is only using 1.5 Megabyte doing so, should not put any strain on your system's resource usage.

It is available as a portable version and installer which is another plus. While it may not be useful to all users, for instance those who only display one window in the foreground at all times, it can be one of those tiny little time savers for others who display multiple windows next to each other most of the time while using the system.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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