In the Details: The Long Scroll
When dragging within a window, standard behavior dictates that when the cursor contacts the edge of the window, the page will scroll. This allows objects to be dragged to a location that isn’t currently in view, or a selection to be made that extends past the window’s edge. There are a couple of different methods for accelerating that scrolling. For example, when creating a selection with the marquee tool in Photoshop, the farther the cursor moves outside the boundaries of the window, the faster it will scroll in that direction. On the other hand, when dragging folders in OS windows, there is a narrow area inside the border of the window within which dragging will cause scrolling. The closer to the edge the object is dragged, the faster the scrolling will be.
The problem with the selection dragging is that a window will often be right against the edge of the desktop. If such is the case, it isn’t possible to move the cursor outside of the window, so the window scrolls very slowly. This can be painful if you are trying to select several paragraphs of text, or if you are at a high zoom level.
