Imagine a situation where you have multiple windows (File Explorer, Web pages etc.) open in a Windows desktop environment and you want to quickly access the contents on these windows without worrying about actually clicking on it and then scrolling over the contents. Mac OS has this feature available where users can scroll down on the inactive windows in the background without bringing them to focus.
In earlier builds of Windows 10, this feature was missing. However, the issue was fixed and it was added back in the later builds. You can enable this feature using a simple registry tweak. This is a quite small feature, but comes in handy at times!
Here’s how to do so :
How To Enable Background Scrolling Without Clicking On A Window
1. Press Windows Key + R to open Run prompt. Type regedit.exe and hit Enter. Select Yes in the User Account Control window that pops up, to launch Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following key in the left pane of Registry Editor:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
3. Now in the right side window, scroll down to the DWORD named MouseWheelRouting and double click it.
4. Change the value of the DWORD to 3 as shown in the above image.
5. Click OK and close the Registry Editor. Sign Out and Sign In to make the changes effective. Once you’ve logged back in, you’ll notice that now you are able to scroll without losing the focus over the current window.
That is it. If you would like to restore the previous setting and turn off this feature, you can always go back and change the value of MouseWheelRouting back to its default.
