Have you ever wished you could have the same cool inertia scrolling on your UMPC as the ever so popular iPhone? Well believe it or not, you can with relative ease. If you use Firefox a free add-on will do just that. Its called Grab and Drag, and it will enable inertia scroll which can be toggled on or off at the user’s convenience. A comprehensive group of settings will help you customize your inertia scrolling just the way you want it. Probably my favorite feature of this addon is that the scrolling is silky smooth, even on my two year old UX180. This is a must have for any UMPC user as it truly helps you increase the speed in which you navigate web pages, especially long ones such as forums or blogs.

The real key to this add-on is getting the settings right. I would definitely recommend enabling momentum, which is really where the inertia scroll comes from. I prefer to set the drag multiplier (on the More Options tab) to 1.0 which means the screen moves exactly as much as your finger moves the cursor, if you set it higher than 1.0 when you move your finger (and subsequently the cursor) one inch on the screen, the page will move further than one inch. The setting of 1.0 keeps the ratio exactly 1:1, and makes it easy to drag the page around and stop exactly where you want to. I also tend to have a low friction setting which means the page will scroll fairly far before stopping when I give it a good fling. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the momentum sliders to get your settings just the way you’d like them.

Below is a short video-demo of the add-on in action, even in the relatively low frame rate YouTube video you can see how smoothly it handles web page scrolling (apologies for the blur).