I just installed SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.1 RC and, by default, on my laptop the synaptics touchpad has the botton section or horizontal scroll mapped to the forward and back browser buttons in Firefox. Fortunately I found a reference for how to fix it on the internet.
The basic idea is that you need to go to about:config in Firefox and change mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to ‘0’ and mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines to ‘true’