Element: wheel event

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

This event replaces the non-standard deprecated mousewheel event.

Bubbles Yes
Cancelable Yes
Interface WheelEvent
Event handler property onwheel

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 of the target 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();

  scale += event.deltaY * -0.01;

  // 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');
el.onwheel = zoom;

addEventListener equivalent

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

el.addEventListener('wheel', zoom);

Specifications

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
7
8.0

See also

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License v2.5 or later.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/wheel_event