Mouse Tester

Catches double-click chatter and checks wheel, CPS and polling rate

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About this tool

This tool catches the fault where one press of a mouse button registers as two, known as chatter. If the same button fires again within 80 milliseconds - faster than any finger can move - the tool treats it as the switch contact bouncing and warns you. You also get per-button click counts, a history of click intervals, a ten-second clicks-per-second test, wheel direction and ticks, a movement trail and an estimated polling rate.

How to use

  1. Click the left, right and wheel buttons inside the dashed box; the per-button counters go up.
  2. Watch the click interval history for red bars - those are the suspected chatter events.
  3. Keep clicking the left button to measure your clicks per second over ten seconds.
  4. Move the mouse slowly and widely inside the box to see the trail and the polling-rate estimate.

Frequently asked questions

What exactly is mouse chatter?
When the metal contact inside the button wears out, a single press makes the contact bounce and sends two or more signals. In practice you see drags breaking apart or a single click opening a file.
Why 80 milliseconds?
Even the fastest person needs around 100 milliseconds to press the same button twice with the same finger. Anything shorter is conventionally taken as machine-made rather than human.
My mouse is rated at 1000 Hz but the reading is lower.
Browsers coalesce mouse-move events to the display refresh rate before delivering them. This tool digs out the raw samples behind that batching, but some resolution is still lost through the OS and browser, so treat the number as an estimate.
My back and forward buttons do not register.
Either the mouse does not have them, or the vendor software has remapped them to something else - a keyboard shortcut, for instance. Once remapped to a key they no longer arrive as mouse buttons.

The chatter verdict is an inference from the click signals the browser received. Before replacing a switch, repeat the test a few times and check that the same symptom keeps appearing. Click coordinates and the movement trail stay in your browser and are never sent to a server.

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