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Document: wheel event

The wheel event fires when the user rotates a wheel button on a pointing device (typically a mouse).

Bubbles	Yes
Cancelable	Yes
Interface	`WheelEvent`
Event handler property	`GlobalEventHandlers.onwheel`

This event replaces the non-standard deprecated mousewheel event.

Note: Don't confuse the wheel event with the scroll event. The default action of a wheel event is implementation-specific, and doesn't necessarily dispatch a scroll event. Even when it does, the delta* values in the wheel event don't necessarily reflect the content's scrolling direction. Therefore, do not rely on the wheel event's delta* properties to get the scrolling direction. Instead, detect value changes of scrollLeft and scrollTop in the scroll event.

Examples

Scaling an element via the wheel

This example shows how to scale an element using the mouse (or other pointing device) wheel.

<div>Scale me with your mouse wheel.</div>

body {
  min-height: 100vh;
  margin: 0;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
}

div {
  width: 105px;
  height: 105px;
  background: #cdf;
  padding: 5px;
}

function zoom(event) {
  event.preventDefault();

  if (event.deltaY < 0) {
    // Zoom in
    scale *= event.deltaY * -2;
  }
  else {
    // Zoom out
    scale /= event.deltaY * 2;
  }

  // Restrict scale
  scale = Math.min(Math.max(.125, scale), 4);

  // Apply scale transform
  el.style.transform = `scale(${scale})`;
}

let scale = 1;
const el = document.querySelector('div');
document.onwheel = zoom;

addEventListener equivalent

The event handler can also be set up using the addEventListener() method:

document.addEventListener('wheel', zoom);

Specifications

Specification
UI Events # event-type-wheel

Browser compatibility

	Desktop						Mobile
	Chrome	Edge	Firefox	Internet Explorer	Opera	Safari	WebView Android	Chrome Android	Firefox for Android	Opera Android	Safari on IOS	Samsung Internet
`wheel_event`	61	12	17	9 Internet Explorer only exposes the wheel event via `addEventListener`; there is no `onwheel` attribute on DOM objects. See IE bug 782835.	48	7	61	61	17	45	No	8.0