Brian On Software

A couple of months ago, I purchased a new MX Revolution mouse from the good folks at Logitech. I love it so much, that I decided to get another mouse from the Revolution series for work, this time a VX Revolution. Unfortunately, while playing with these computerized ‘mice’, I had trouble figuring how to open a link in a new tab under Firefox (2.x or newer) or Internet Explorer. I used to just hover on the link and click the middle button of the mouse and, like magic (well, not really), the link would open in a new tab of its own. Talk about productivity! I think I was saving myself three or four calories by clicking on the middle button instead of moving my index finger to hold the CTRL button on the keyboard and left-click on the link. But what about now?

After searching around on the Web, I couldn’t believe that no one wrote a solution for this ‘problem’. Is this an impossible task for this kind of mouse or aren’t people trying a little bit more? So I took some time to find a solution to this little problem…

Here’s what I did to enable the ‘open link in a new tab’ under Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) by clicking the middle button of your MX or VX Revolution mouse from Logitech. You do have to install the SetPoint software that is provided with any good product sold by Logitech or download it directly from Logitech’s website, in order for this to work. I’m currently using SetPoint version 4.0.

Follow these simple steps to enable this functionality with your MX/VX Revolution mouse:

1. Launch the SetPoint program or right-click the icon on the taskbar and click on “Mouse and Keyboard Settings”
2. Make sure that your mouse model is set to “MX Revolution” or “VX Revolution” (Step 1).
3. Select the third item from the “Select Button” (Step 2) which corresponds to the middle button of the mouse.
4. Under the “Select Program” listbox (bottom left of the image), click on the “Manage Programs…” button. If you don’t see the Firefox or IE application in the list of programs, make sure you add the full path to the executable file, i.e., C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe. Close the window if Firefox and/or IE is already there, or if you have just added it.
5. Now click on the Firefox program or the Internet Explorer program in the “Select Program” listbox (you can personalize all your programs, but here we’re just concentrating on Firefox and IE) and under the “Select Task” (Step 3) list of buttons, click on Other (the last one), then click on the “Select Function” button.
6. In the “Select Task” window, make sure to open the listbox and select the “Middle Button” option (press ‘M’ on your keyboard if you can’t find it due to impatience in getting this thing done). Then click on OK to close this window, and OK again to close the main (parent) window.

Picture 1. Here’s the picture of what you should see in the mouse configuration settings of SetPoint

You should now be able to open a link in a new tab under Firefox or IE simply by clicking the link with the middle button of your MX or VX Revolution mouse.