Trackpad Test

What to try

1. 1

   Draw a slow circle with one finger. The trail should follow smoothly, without jumps or stalls in one part of the pad.

2. 2

   Click, then two-finger click. The second should report the right button, which is how a trackpad sends a context click.

3. 3

   Scroll with two fingers, up, down and sideways. Direction and amount appear with the unit the browser used.

4. 4

   Pinch in and out. Browsers deliver that as a zoom rather than a scroll, and the page reports it separately.

What the readings mean

A trail that stutters or jumps in the same spot every time points at the pad's surface or its cable, especially on an older laptop. A trail that is smooth here but jumpy elsewhere usually points at a driver setting, such as palm rejection or a pointer-acceleration curve, rather than at the hardware.

Scrolling is reported in pixels, lines or pages depending on the system, which is why the unit is always shown. What matters is that the direction matches what you did and that the amount is steady for a steady gesture.

About pressure

This page makes no claim about click pressure. Most trackpads report no pressure to a browser at all: the value arrives as 0 when nothing is pressed and 0.5 when a button is down, which is simply the standard's way of saying "pressed, no sensor". The reading is shown for what it is, and where a device really does report a pressure value it appears as the browser's own figure. Pens are different, and the Stylus / Pen Pressure Test covers them.

What this page cannot do

It cannot see gestures your system handles for itself, such as three-finger swipes between desktops or the gesture that opens an application switcher: those never reach a web page. It cannot measure tracking speed, jitter or latency. And it works inside the browser window only, so it cannot tell you whether the pad behaves elsewhere on your computer.

For a mouse instead, use the Mouse Tester; for a touchscreen, the Touchscreen Test.