Guide
Testing a mouse: buttons, wheel, double-click faults and polling rate
A mouse has few parts, and most of them wear out: switches that double-click by themselves, a wheel that skips, a sensor that drops out. This tester gives each part a visible check in the browser, plus two measurements that are hard to see by eye: the gap between repeated presses of one button, and how often the mouse reports its position.
The buttons
Move the pointer into the test area and press each button. Left, middle, right, back and forward light up while pressed and turn green once they have been used, so you can see at a glance if a side button does nothing. The pointer position is shown as coordinates, and the Reset button clears everything.
The wheel
Scroll up and down inside the area. The page counts steps in each direction and shows the size of the last step in pixels. A wheel with a worn encoder may skip, count in the wrong direction occasionally or give uneven step sizes. Smooth-scroll wheels and touchpads report smaller steps, so comparing two devices is more useful than looking for one number.
The double-click test
Press one button on purpose a few times, at your usual speed. The page lists the time between presses of the same button, in milliseconds, and the median. If a press comes sooner than the threshold after the one before, the page flags it. With the threshold at 60 ms, a press 25 ms after the previous one is flagged; a human cannot normally click twice in 25 ms, so the switch is probably chattering.
A worked example
Press Sample to load an example run: a polling rate of 1000 Hz, gaps between presses of 310, 280, 25, 340, 295 and 410 ms, a median of 303 ms, and one press flagged as faster than 60 ms. The warning explains that if you did not click that fast, the switch may be chattering, which is a common fault of worn mouse buttons.
Measuring the polling rate
Turn on Measure while I move the mouse and keep moving steadily for a few seconds. The page times the gaps between pointer events, including the extra events some browsers group together, and shows the rate in hertz with the nearest common value. A 1000 Hz mouse has a gap of 1 ms, a 125 Hz mouse 8 ms. The browser, the operating system and the screen refresh can lower the figure, and a notice appears if it is under 400 Hz, so take it as a lower bound.
Edge cases
Some browsers deliver one pointer event per screen refresh, which caps the result at 60 or 144 Hz unless they supply the finer events. A slow, jerky movement gives a low reading. Wireless mice may switch to a lower rate to save power while idle. Touchpads are not meant for this test.
Limits
It cannot test the sensor’s tracking quality, DPI accuracy or lift-off distance. The flagging threshold is only a guide. Results are not stored.
What the polling rate means in time
The polling rate is the number of position reports a second, so the time between reports is its reciprocal: 8 ms at 125 Hz, 2 ms at 500 Hz, 1 ms at 1,000 Hz and 0.125 ms at 8,000 Hz. A faster rate means the cursor position is never more than that many milliseconds old, which matters mostly in fast games and on high refresh rate screens. When you compare two mice, use the same surface, the same browser and the same movement speed, because those change the figure as much as the hardware does.
Related tools
- Keyboard Test checks every key and rollover.
- Aim Trainer tests accuracy and reaction time with the mouse.
- Gamepad Tester checks controller input.
- Refresh Rate Test measures the screen’s refresh rate.
Checked against the current version of the Mouse Tester on .