Mouse Drift Test
Check whether your mouse reports movement while it is sitting perfectly still. Rest your pointer in the box below, take your hand off the mouse, and this test tallies any motion the sensor sends — the total distance, the largest single jump, and how often it fires — then gives 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.
What mouse drift and jitter are
Drift is when the on-screen pointer creeps or twitches even though the mouse is not being moved. Because a modern mouse is an optical or laser sensor taking thousands of tiny pictures of the surface each second, it can misread that surface and report movement that never happened. Jitter is the rapid, small-scale version of the same fault — the cursor shivering in place. This tool measures exactly what your operating system passes to the browser: every reported change in pointer position while the mouse should be stationary is counted as drift. A healthy mouse resting untouched should report essentially nothing.
What causes sensor drift
- A dirty, dusty, or failing optical sensor lens that misreads the surface below it.
- A poor tracking surface — high-gloss, glass, mirrored, or transparent tables give the sensor nothing consistent to lock onto.
- Lift-off distance quirks, where the sensor still tracks faint detail even as the mouse is set down or nudged.
- Interference on wireless mice: a weak battery, a crowded 2.4 GHz band, or a distant receiver can inject stray movement.
- Sensor "spin-out" or malfunction, where cheap or worn sensors emit large phantom jumps, sometimes flinging the cursor across the screen.
How to fix mouse drift
- Clean the sensor: power off, and gently wipe the lens and the mouse feet with a dry microfiber cloth or a puff of air.
- Change the surface: use a proper cloth or hard mousepad instead of glass, glossy, or textured desks.
- Update firmware and drivers from the manufacturer, which often patch tracking and spin-out bugs.
- Adjust DPI: a very high DPI amplifies tiny sensor noise into visible jitter, so try a lower setting.
- For a wireless mouse, replace the battery, move the receiver closer, and keep it away from USB 3.0 ports and other 2.4 GHz devices.
What a browser test can and cannot see
A web page only sees the pointer positions the operating system chooses to report, so this test measures OS-level output rather than the raw sensor. Pointer acceleration, smoothing, and per-mouse tuning all sit between the hardware and the browser, which means a small amount of reported motion is not always a hardware fault. For the cleanest reading, take your hand off the mouse entirely — any tremor from your fingers is real movement, not drift. If you want to look at the buttons and scroll wheel instead, use the Mouse Tester, and to measure your sensor’s true resolution use the Mouse DPI Analyzer.