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I have a mouse with some extra buttons on it, and two of them on the side are treated as forward/back buttons by default for some reason - both in Windows and Linux. When using Windows, I can use X-Mouse Button Control to prevent these button presses from reaching Firefox, and it allows the signal to reach other programs - like Ventrilo, which is what I use it for. However, on Linux, there doesn't seem to exist any such solution. I want to be able to use this button as a PTT button without it forcing me backwards a page while I'm using Firefox. Any ideas? Also, might this button sending some kind of universal "back" signal and not just "button 8"? How could I find out?

I posted this question on reddit recently, you can see that here.

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I feel your pain. On my mouse, the accident-prone side buttons are 8 and 9 according to xev (4 and 5 are wheel scroll up/down). I use the following in my window manager startup script:

xinput set-button-map '<device name of mouse>' 1 2 3 4 5 16 17 18 19

By mapping buttons 6-9 to their original mapping + 10, they effectively become unbound to any default settings in any software that I'm aware of, but still output a usable value in case you want to deliberately enable them in software that allows custom mapping. If you just want to disable a button altogether, you can map it to zero. For more details, see man xinput(1).

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  • 3.5 years later I don't use that mouse anymore, and instead use this one with the side buttons programmed as the number pad. redragonusa.com/products/mice/M901/7 But that may still be a useful solution for others, thank you.
    – YAOMTC
    Mar 25, 2018 at 13:53
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    I'd still like to see a Firefox-local solution to this. It's ridiculous that Firefox lacks any option to turn this "feature" off from within the browser rather than having to remap your mouse buttons. Apr 26, 2020 at 18:21
  • @R..GitHubSTOPHELPINGICE: superuser.com/a/1267965/598527
    – user198350
    Aug 15, 2020 at 7:22

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