How many times a second your Mac hands the mouse to a program

3 October 2026

Move the mouse over the field below for three to five seconds — continuously, ideally in circles. The page counts pointer events right in your browser: nothing is sent or saved, and the numbers are gone when you close the tab.

The check

What we count	Last second	Best second
`pointermove` — how many times the browser told the page about movement	—	—
`getCoalescedEvents` — how many movements the browser got from the system inside those events	—	—
`pointerrawupdate` — movements not tied to a frame (not every browser has it)	—	—
`requestAnimationFrame` — how many frames the page drew in the same time, for comparison	—	—

Without JavaScript the field does nothing: the numbers are counted by this page's own script, and only in it.

How to read the numbers

If there are about as many events as frames (the pointermove and requestAnimationFrame rows), the browser tells the page about movement once per frame. Most browsers work this way, and for a web page that is normal.
The movements inside events are closer to what the browser got from macOS. If there are about as many of them as frames too (60 or 120), movement reached the browser roughly once per display frame — however many reports a second the mouse itself sent.
The mouse's own rate — 125, 500 or 1000 reports a second — is invisible to a browser: it only gets what the system lets through. Programs that read the mouse straight from the device show it.

This is the path to a browser, not to a game

A browser is an ordinary macOS program and gets the mouse the same way as any window. But it has its own rules: it may merge events into a frame, cap how often it draws and slow a tab down in the background. So the numbers here show the path “system → browser”, not what a particular game will receive.

How we measured the path to an ordinary program without a browser, and reading straight from the device — with the mouse, display, date and code — is on “Why aim feels floaty on a Mac”. In our measurement of 25 September 2026 (MacBook Pro 14″ with M3 Pro, 120 Hz display, macOS 26.6.2; Logitech G309 through its receiver at 1000 Hz; 20 seconds, not in a game), an ordinary app received about 119 events per second against about 844 when read from the device.

To make the check fair

Keep moving: a second in which the mouse stood still has no events and does not count as the best.
Keep the tab in front and the window on screen: in the background a browser cuts both frames and events.
The numbers depend on the refresh rate of the display the browser window is on: on a 60 Hz external monitor they may be half of what a 120 Hz display gives. Low Power Mode can lower the refresh rate too.
On a trackpad, or with a mouse that sends 125 reports a second, there may be no difference between the mouse and the display at all.

What the page does with the numbers

Nothing: they are counted in this tab's memory and sent nowhere — not to us, not to anyone else. We do not count visits or measurements on this site, and there is no third-party analytics; the only thing the site counts is downloads of the app through the Download link, with no addresses or fingerprints. The privacy policy says all of this.