Mouse Drift Test
Check whether your mouse reports movement while it sits perfectly still. Rest your pointer in the box below, take your hand off the mouse, and the test tallies every motion the sensor sends — then returns a clean-or-drifting verdict after a five-second hold.
Reported motion, magnified 40×
Rest your pointer in the box and don’t touch the mouse — any motion below is reported as sensor drift. Run the timed test for a verdict.
Mouse drift is when the on-screen pointer creeps or twitches even though the mouse is not being moved. A modern mouse is an optical or laser camera taking thousands of tiny pictures of the surface each second; when it misreads that surface, it reports movement that never happened. Jitter is the rapid, small-scale version of the same fault — the cursor shivering in place — while a sensor "spin-out" can fling the pointer across the screen. A healthy mouse resting untouched should report nothing at all.
This test counts every pointer-movement event your operating system delivers to the browser while the mouse should be stationary. It sums each reported move into a running drift total, tracks the largest single jump and the events per second, and plots the motion magnified so even sub-pixel shivering becomes visible. The timed run locks in a five-second window and ends with a verdict. Everything runs locally in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Near-zero pixels over five seconds means the sensor is clean; a steady trickle of events or a large max jump points at the sensor, the surface, or a wireless link. A web page only sees the pointer positions the operating system chooses to report — acceleration, smoothing, and per-mouse tuning all sit between the hardware and the browser — so a stray event or two is not automatically a hardware fault. To check the buttons and scroll wheel instead, use the Mouse Tester; to measure your sensor’s true resolution, use the Mouse DPI Analyzer.
Common causes of mouse drift
| Cause | What you see | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Dirty or dusty sensor lens | Constant low-level jitter in place | Power off, then gently clean the lens and mouse feet with a dry microfiber cloth or a puff of air |
| Poor tracking surface | Random creeping, worst on glass, gloss, or mirrored desks | Switch to a proper cloth or hard mousepad |
| Wireless interference | Intermittent stray movement or stutter | Replace the battery, move the receiver closer, and keep it away from USB 3.0 ports and other 2.4 GHz devices |
| Very high DPI setting | Tiny sensor noise amplified into visible shiver | Lower the DPI in your mouse software |
| Worn or failing sensor | Large phantom jumps — the cursor flung across the screen | Update firmware and drivers, which often patch spin-out bugs; if it persists, replace the mouse |