Touchpad test

Measures what your touchpad actually sends the browser — rate, backtracks, momentum, pinch — and says plainly which parts no web page can see at all.

Move the cursor around in here, click, drag, scroll with two fingers and try a pinch. Everything is measured as you go.

0 + 0 events

Movement

Delivery rate: —
Path length: 0 px
Longest stall: —
Backtracks: 0

Times the pointer went back on itself by more than a right angle while your finger was moving forward. On a healthy pad, drawing a line or a smooth curve, this stays at zero.

Scrolling

Looks like: not enough to say yet
Smallest step: —
Event unit: pixels
Direction: no scrolling yet
Sideways scrolling: not yet

A wheel is a ratchet: every notch sends one event with a large fixed jump. A touchpad has no notches, so a single gesture arrives as dozens of small ones. The verdict comes from that number, which is sitting right beside it.

Momentum · Pinch

Momentum: not detected
Pinch: not seen

Flick quickly and lift your fingers. If your system has momentum scrolling, events keep arriving and shrinking after you let go; a mouse wheel never does that.

The browser turns a pinch into a wheel event with the Control key flagged. The factor is relative: it grows and shrinks with your fingers, but it does not measure how far apart they are.

Buttons

Left click · not yetMiddle click · not yetRight click · not yetDouble click · not yetDrag · not yet

A tap-to-click and a physical click arrive identically: the system sends them as the same event and there is no way to tell them apart from here.

What the browser does NOT see

How many fingers are down. No API reports this for a touchpad at all.
Where on the pad you are touching. Events arrive in page coordinates, not pad coordinates, so a dead corner on the pad is undetectable from here.
Three- and four-finger gestures. The operating system keeps them for switching desktops or showing all windows, and nothing reaches the browser.
Pressure or Force Touch. There is no live standard API for this on a touchpad. A page showing you a force gauge is not measuring anything.
Palm rejection. It happens inside the driver, before any event exists.

For everything above, the place it can genuinely be checked is the system itself: on Windows, Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Touchpad, which lists the gestures your driver recognises; on macOS, System Settings → Trackpad, which animates each one. If a gesture fails there, the browser is not the problem.

Generated right here, in your browser. What you type never leaves your device.

Keep going with Mouse tester Scroll test Keyboard tester Touchscreen test

A touchpad going wrong is a miserable thing to diagnose, because the symptoms are vague and the suspects are many. The cursor jumps. Two-finger scrolling stopped working. It clicks when you did not click. Is that the hardware, the driver, a Windows update, or a crumb under the corner of the pad?

A web page can help with some of that and not with the rest, and the honest thing is to be specific about which is which. What a browser receives is not your touchpad. It is a stream of events the operating system produced after its driver had already decided what your fingers meant. Two fingers moving arrive as a scroll. A pinch arrives as a scroll with a modifier key flagged. Three fingers arrive as nothing at all, because the window manager kept them.

So this measures the stream, properly and with real numbers: how fast the pointer is delivered, how far it travelled, the longest stall in a stroke, how often it doubled back on itself, the size of the smallest scroll step, whether momentum scrolling is switched on and how long the tail runs, and whether a pinch reaches the page. Then it lists, in plain words, the five things it cannot see — and where to go and check those instead. One page that already ranks for this term shows a "Force-Touch gauge" for a trackpad. There is no API behind that number.

Manual

How to use it

1
Move the cursor around inside the box

Draw a slow, deliberate line or a curve. The trace follows you and the four readings update as you go — no button to press, nothing to allow.
2
Watch the backtrack count while you draw

It counts how often the pointer went back on itself by more than a right angle while your finger was going forwards. Drawing a smooth stroke on a healthy pad, it stays at zero. If it climbs while you draw a straight line, that is the jumping you came here about, and it is real rather than imagined.
3
Scroll with two fingers

The panel reports the smallest step it saw and what unit the events arrived in, and from that says whether this looks like a touchpad or a mouse wheel. The number it decided from is printed next to the verdict so you can disagree with it.
4
Flick hard and let go

If your system has momentum scrolling, events keep arriving after your fingers leave, getting smaller each time. The panel reports how long that tail ran. A mouse wheel never produces one.
5
Try a pinch

The dashed square in the middle scales with it. The factor beside it is relative — it grows and shrinks with your fingers but does not measure how far apart they are, because nothing in the browser knows that.
6
Click each button, and drag

Left, right, middle if you have one, a double click, and a drag of more than a couple of centimetres. Each lights up when it arrives. A tap-to-click and a physical click are the same event, so nothing here can tell them apart.

In depth

Things worth keeping in mind

What the browser can and cannot see

This is the whole shape of the tool, so it is worth setting out plainly rather than leaving you to infer it from what is missing.

Can see: cursor movement, and therefore delivery rate, path length, stalls and backtracks.
Can see: two-finger scrolling, as `wheel` events, with the step size and the unit they arrived in.
Can see: momentum scrolling, as a decaying tail of events after your fingers lift.
Can see: pinch to zoom on the touchpad, which arrives as a `wheel` event with the ctrl flag and gives a relative zoom factor.
Can see: the touchpad's left and right buttons, the middle one if you have it, plus tap-to-click, double clicks and drags.
Cannot see: how many fingers are on the pad. There is no API, on any platform.
Cannot see: where on the pad you are touching, so a dead spot in one corner is invisible from here.
Cannot see: three- and four-finger gestures, which the window manager consumes first.
Cannot see: pressure or Force Touch, which has no live standard API for a touchpad.
Cannot see: palm rejection, which happens in the driver before an event exists.

Precision touchpads, and why it matters which you have

On a Windows laptop the single biggest factor in how the pad behaves is not the hardware. It is whether the pad is running under Microsoft's Precision Touchpad specification or under a driver written by the laptop vendor.

A Precision touchpad reports raw contact points and lets Windows interpret them. That means the gestures are the same on every machine, the settings live in one place, and Windows Update maintains them. A vendor-driver pad interprets the gestures itself, in its own control panel, with its own names for them, and the quality varies enormously between manufacturers and between models from the same manufacturer.

The quick check is in Settings, under Bluetooth & devices, Touchpad. If the line "Your PC has a precision touchpad" appears, you have the standard behaviour. If it does not, gesture settings live in whatever utility your laptop shipped with, and a missing gesture is far more likely to be a driver setting than a fault.

On a Mac the question does not arise, because Apple makes the pad, the driver and the operating system, which is a large part of why Mac trackpads have the reputation they do.

A touchpad is not a touchscreen

They feel like the same technology and, at the sensor level, they broadly are — both measure capacitance changes across a grid. What differs completely is what the software does with the result, and that difference is exactly why the two need different test pages.

A touchscreen is absolute. You touch a point and that is the point, so the browser receives touch events with coordinates, a finger count, a contact radius and often a pressure figure. Everything is exposed, because the screen is the surface the page is drawn on.

A touchpad is relative. It is somewhere else entirely from the screen, so the driver converts your finger into cursor motion with acceleration applied, and the page never learns where on the pad you were or how many fingers were down. The interesting measurements are all in the stream itself.

That is why the touchscreen test on this site can map the physical surface and this page cannot, and why the readings here are about rate, granularity and shape instead. If you are testing a phone or a tablet, that page is the one to use.

History

How the pad got onto the laptop

The touchpad was not the obvious answer, and for about a decade it lost. Early portables tried everything: a clip-on trackball on the side, a trackball built into the palm rest, and IBM's pointing stick — the red TrackPoint, introduced on the ThinkPad in 1992, which put a strain-gauge nub between the G, H and B keys so your hands never left the home row. It is still there on ThinkPads today, and its defenders are not quiet about it.

The capacitive pad as we know it came from George Gerpheide's work at the University of Utah in the late 1980s, commercialised through Cirque. Apple put one into the PowerBook 500 in 1994 and the industry followed within a few years, because a pad has no moving parts to wear out and takes almost no depth — which mattered enormously as laptops got thin.

For its first decade it was a one-finger device with two buttons underneath. Multi-touch changed what it was for: Apple's MacBooks brought two-finger scrolling and pinch gestures to the pad in the mid-2000s, and in 2015 replaced the hinge entirely with the Force Touch trackpad, which does not move at all and fakes the click with a linear actuator so convincingly that people argue about whether it moved.

Windows had a harder time, because the pad belonged to whoever made the laptop and every vendor wrote their own driver. Gestures worked differently on every machine and often not at all. Microsoft's answer was the Precision Touchpad specification, introduced around Windows 8.1 and pushed hard from Windows 10 onwards: the pad reports raw contact points and Windows itself does the interpreting. That is why gesture support on a Windows laptop suddenly became consistent, and why "does it have a Precision touchpad" is still a sensible question to ask before buying one.

1992: The TrackPoint arrives on the ThinkPad
1994: The PowerBook 500 ships a capacitive pad
2015: Force Touch replaces the hinge with an actuator
0: Browser APIs that report touchpad finger count

How it works

What actually reaches the page

A mouse is simple: it reports movement and buttons, and the operating system passes them on more or less intact. A touchpad is not a pointing device at all until software makes it one. The pad reports a set of contact points many times a second, and a driver decides that one moving finger is a cursor, two moving fingers are a scroll, two fingers moving apart are a zoom, and three fingers are a system gesture that no application will ever hear about.

By the time anything reaches a web page it has been through all of that. There is no touchpad API in any browser, and none is proposed. What arrives is `pointermove` for the cursor, `wheel` for two-finger scrolling, `wheel` with `ctrlKey` set for a pinch — a convention every major browser follows and none of them ever specified — and ordinary mouse buttons for clicks.

That constraint is what makes the scroll classification here possible and worth doing. A mouse wheel is a ratchet: it has physical detents, and each one produces exactly one event carrying a large fixed delta — a hundred pixels in Chrome, three lines in Firefox, which is why the units matter as much as the numbers. A touchpad has no detents at all, so the driver reports the finger continuously and a single flick arrives as dozens of events carrying single-digit pixel values. Measuring the smallest step in the stream tells the two apart reliably, and the tool shows you that measurement rather than only its conclusion.

Momentum is detected the same way, from shape rather than from assumption. After your fingers lift, a precision touchpad driver keeps synthesising wheel events with shrinking deltas until the scroll coasts to a stop. The test is that the steps mostly fall, that the last one is well under half the peak, and that the whole tail lasted long enough that a decelerating hand could not have produced it. All three have to hold before the panel claims it, because a hand slowing down looks superficially similar and wobbles as it goes.

By hand

Working out where the fault actually is

Four steps, in this order, because each one rules out a whole category and the order is what saves you time.

1

Capacitive sensing is affected by moisture and by grease. A pad that jumps intermittently is very often a pad with a smear on it, and a damp fingertip is the single most common cause of a cursor that will not sit still. Wipe it with a barely damp cloth, dry it, wash and dry your hands, and try again before assuming anything is broken.
2

If the mouse behaves perfectly, the problem is the pad or its driver. If the mouse jumps too, it is not the pad at all — it is the system, and you have just saved yourself from replacing the wrong part.
3

On Windows, Settings, then Bluetooth & devices, then Touchpad. On macOS, System Settings, then Trackpad, which animates each gesture. If a gesture is missing or switched off there, no web page will ever see it, and this is where it gets fixed.
4

A genuinely common and genuinely strange one. A poorly earthed laptop charger, or a cheap third-party one, can couple mains noise into the pad and make the cursor jitter or jump. If the problem disappears the moment the charger comes out, the pad is fine and the charger is the fault.
5

Touchpad behaviour changes with driver updates far more often than pads break. In Windows Device Manager, find the pad under Mice and other pointing devices, open its properties, and use "Roll back driver" if the button is available. That undoes an update that changed something you liked.

Diagnosis

If something is not working

Symptom:The cursor jumps around or drifts on its own

Likely cause:: Usually moisture, grease or a crumb on the pad surface. Sometimes electrical noise from the charger. Occasionally a driver.
What to do:: Wipe the pad with a barely damp cloth and dry it, then wash and dry your hands — a damp fingertip is the most common cause by a distance. If it persists, unplug the charger and see whether it stops: a poorly earthed charger genuinely does this. Only after both of those is it worth suspecting the driver.

Symptom:The pad does nothing at all

Likely cause:: It is switched off. Most laptops have a shortcut for this and it is very easy to hit by accident.
What to do:: Look along the function keys for one with a crossed-out pad icon and press it with Fn. On many ThinkPads and some others there is a double-tap gesture in the top-left corner of the pad itself. If neither works, check that the pad is enabled in your system settings before assuming hardware.

Symptom:Two-finger scrolling stopped working

Likely cause:: A driver update reset the gesture settings, or the pad is not running as a Precision touchpad any more.
What to do:: On Windows, open Settings, Bluetooth & devices, Touchpad, and check that scrolling is enabled — if the page says "Your PC has a precision touchpad" you have the full gesture set, and if it does not, the vendor driver is in charge and its own control panel has the setting. On macOS the switch is in System Settings, Trackpad, Scroll & Zoom.

Symptom:It clicks when I only meant to rest a finger

Likely cause:: Tap-to-click is on and its sensitivity is set high, or palm rejection is not catching your hand while you type.
What to do:: Turn tap-to-click off and use the physical click for a day to confirm that is what it was. If it is, turn it back on and lower the touchpad sensitivity a step — on Windows that setting is right under the gesture list, and on macOS reducing tracking speed and turning off "Tap to click" has the same effect.

Symptom:It scrolls the wrong way

Likely cause:: Nothing is broken. Your system is set to the other scrolling direction, and the two conventions have coexisted since 2011.
What to do:: On Windows, Settings, Bluetooth & devices, Touchpad, "Scrolling direction". On macOS, System Settings, Trackpad, "Natural scrolling". This page reports which direction it saw so you can confirm the change took effect without hunting for a page long enough to scroll.

Symptom:The cursor stutters or lags behind my finger

Likely cause:: The system is too busy to deliver events on time, rather than the pad failing to send them.
What to do:: Look at the delivery rate and the longest stall on this page: a healthy pad delivers steadily, and a large stall next to a normal rate means something interrupted the system rather than the pad missing anything. Close some tabs and applications and try again. If the stall goes away, the pad was never the problem.

Symptom:It worked perfectly until a Windows update

Likely cause:: The update replaced your touchpad driver, which is one of the most common ways gestures change or disappear.
What to do:: Open Device Manager, find the pad under "Mice and other pointing devices", open Properties, then Driver, and use "Roll back driver" if it is available. If it is greyed out, download the driver for your exact model from the laptop manufacturer's support page rather than taking whichever generic one Windows chose.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

A pinch is a scroll wearing a hat

No browser has a pinch event for a touchpad. What every major one does instead is send a `wheel` event with `ctrlKey` reported as true, because ctrl-plus-wheel was already the zoom gesture on a mouse. It is a convention nobody specified and everybody implements, and it is the only reason a web page can respond to a pinch at all.

Your pad probably clicks when nothing moves

Apple's Force Touch trackpad has no hinge. It sits still and a linear actuator gives your fingertip a sharp lateral tap at the moment of the click, which your nervous system interprets as a downward press because that is what it expects. The proof is straightforward: with the laptop powered off, the pad does not click at all.

Scrolling direction is a genuinely recent argument

Before 2011, dragging two fingers down scrolled the page down: you were moving a scrollbar. Mac OS X Lion inverted it that year so you were moving the page, the way a finger moves paper, and called it "natural". Windows kept the old direction as its default. There is no right answer and both are still one checkbox away, which is why this page reports the direction it saw rather than telling you which one to use.

The charger really can make the cursor jump

A capacitive pad measures tiny changes in charge, so it is vulnerable to electrical noise. A laptop charger with poor isolation or no earth can leak mains-frequency noise into the chassis and through to the sensor. It is a well-documented complaint with cheap replacement chargers, and the diagnostic takes two seconds: pull the charger out and see whether the cursor settles.

Three fingers never reach the browser

Not on any operating system, in any browser. Three- and four-finger swipes are claimed by the window manager to switch desktops or show all windows, and they are consumed before an application sees them. Any web page offering to test them is testing something else, and that is a straightforward way to judge a page in this category.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Why can this not test three- and four-finger gestures?

Because they never arrive. The operating system claims them for switching desktops and showing windows, and consumes them before any application is offered them. That is not a browser limitation to be worked around — there is nothing to work around, and a page claiming to test them is not testing what it says. Check them in your system settings instead, where they are handled.

Can it detect how hard I am pressing?

No, and neither can anything else on the web. There is no live standard API reporting pressure from a touchpad. Safari once had a non-standard `webkitForce` property for Force Touch, which was never standardised and should not be relied on. A page in this niche showing you a force gauge for a trackpad is displaying a number that is not connected to your finger.

It says "mouse wheel" but I am definitely using my touchpad

Two likely reasons. Either you scrolled only a little, in which case a few events is not enough to tell anything apart and the panel says so, or your driver is reporting in a chunky, wheel-like way — which some older non-Precision Windows touchpad drivers genuinely do. The measurement it decided from is printed right there, so you can see which case you are in.

What counts as too many backtracks?

Drawing one smooth stroke, anything above zero is worth a second look, and a handful during a single straight line is the jumping people complain about. Sub-pixel wobble is deliberately not counted, because every pad has it and reporting it would flag a perfect pad as faulty. Clear the readings and draw one deliberate line to get a clean number.

Does this work on a phone or tablet?

It runs, but it is not the right tool: a touchscreen sends touch events with real coordinates and a genuine finger count, which is a different and much richer stream. The touchscreen test on this site is built for that and reports things this page cannot.

Why does the page not scroll when I scroll inside the box?

Scrolling is prevented inside the test area, and only there, so that a two-finger flick can be measured without the readings you are trying to look at sliding off the screen. Everywhere else on the page scrolls normally.

Is anything recorded or sent anywhere?

No. Everything is measured in your browser and thrown away when you close the tab. There is no account, no storage and no server: the whole site is static files.