Mouse tester

How to run a mouse click test

Move your pointer into the test area and it switches into capture mode: the right-click menu, Windows middle-click autoscroll and the browser's back and forward actions are all blocked there, so pressing a side button tests the button instead of leaving the page. Press each button in turn. The part lights orange while it is held and turns green once it has registered, and the table beside it records the number of presses, how long you held the button, the fastest gap between two presses of that button, the fastest gap between letting go and pressing again, and how many presses look like switch bounce, with a fault rate once you have clicked enough for it to mean something.

The wheel counters below the table show notches up, down and — on mice with a tilting wheel or a thumb wheel — left and right. Moving the cursor draws a fading trail, built from the browser's coalesced pointer events so fast flicks are not reduced to straight lines, and the stats row shows cursor speed and total distance. Everything happens in your browser; nothing is uploaded, and the log can be copied or downloaded as a report.

How the double click test works

A mouse switch is a tiny metal leaf that snaps against a contact. As it wears or oxidises, the contact can bounce, and the mouse's firmware sees two presses where you made one. That is the familiar my mouse double-clicks by itself fault: files open when you meant to select them, and drag-and-drop lets go halfway.

The tester times the gap between letting go of a button and pressing it again. Bounce re-closes the contact within a few milliseconds of it opening; even the fastest deliberate double-click or butterfly click leaves 30 ms or more with the button up. So a press that arrives sooner than the bounce threshold (20 ms by default) after a release is counted as a fault, and so is a press shorter than 8 ms, which no finger can make. This catches both faults: two clicks from one press, and a held button that briefly opens mid-drag. The press-to-press gap is still shown for reference, but it is not used for the verdict, because a quick human double-click and a bouncing switch can have the same press-to-press time. Drag the slider and every past press is re-scored immediately.

To test properly, single-click slowly and deliberately at least twenty times; the diagnosis shows faults as a percentage of presses and stays cautious until you reach twenty. For the drag fault, press Start hold test, then hold the left button for five seconds while moving: any moment the switch opens and closes again is counted as a drop-out. The separate OS double-clicks counter shows how often your operating system turned two presses into a dblclick event, which depends on the double-click speed in your system settings.

Testing the scroll wheel, tilt and side buttons

Roll the wheel slowly, one notch at a time. Browsers do not report notches directly, only scroll distance, so the tester adds up the distance and counts a notch for every 100 pixels (3 lines in Firefox), which is what a standard notched wheel sends on Windows. The readout shows the raw deltaY, its unit and how many wheel events arrived. On a Mac, with a trackpad, a Magic Mouse, smooth scrolling or a high-resolution or free-spinning wheel, the browser sends many small or accelerated steps per notch; the tester spots that, labels it smooth scrolling and the notch count becomes approximate, so judge a Mac wheel by feel and by the direction check rather than by an exact count. The tester also watches for the classic worn-encoder fault, where a steady scroll in one direction briefly jumps the other way. That pattern is logged as a direction glitch; the check only runs on whole-notch steps, so trackpad and inertial scrolling cannot trigger it.

Horizontal scrolling comes from a tilting wheel, a thumb wheel, or holding Shift while rolling in some browsers; the log notes when Shift was held. Side buttons are reported by the browser as buttons 4 (back) and 5 (forward). If yours do nothing here, check whether the mouse's own software has remapped them to a keystroke or a macro — those arrive as keyboard events, which you can confirm in the keyboard tester. Extra buttons beyond five are listed if the browser reports them.

The CPS test and what the numbers mean

Pick a length — 1, 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds — and click the big target. The timer starts on your first click, runs from high-resolution timestamps rather than a counting interval, and ignores clicks that land after the deadline. Your best score for each length is saved in this browser only. Holding Enter or Space does not count; only real mouse or touch presses do.

• 5–7 CPS is typical for ordinary clicking with one finger.
• 8–10 CPS is fast and usually needs practice.
• 10–14 CPS is jitter-clicking territory, where you tense the forearm to vibrate the finger.
• 15+ CPS generally means butterfly clicking with two fingers.

A mouse that double-fires will inflate CPS scores, which is why some games and servers treat very high rates with suspicion. If your CPS jumps well above your normal range and the fault counter rises with it, the mouse is doing the clicking.

What a browser can and can't measure

The page sees what your operating system reports, after any mouse software has had its say. That means a button remapped in Logitech G Hub, Razer Synapse or similar will show up as whatever it is mapped to, and DPI buttons normally never reach the browser at all. The click dispatch delay is the time between the operating system timestamping the click and this page handling it — useful for spotting a busy or throttled system, but it is not the sensor-to-screen latency of the mouse itself.

To check how often the mouse reports its position, use the mouse polling rate checker; for game controllers there is a separate gamepad tester. If a button fails here, try another USB port and, for wireless mice, a fresh battery before blaming the switch — a weak battery causes dropped and doubled clicks too.

Frequently asked questions