Suddenly my mouse has adopted a strange behavior. If, for example, I am in a topic in TSD and I click the back key to return to the forum, it is likely to go back two screens to the opening of TSD rather than to the forum I had come from. Or even back 3 to the new tab I had opened TSD.
This new behavior seemed to start when I changed the battery in the mouse, although that could have been coincidental. At any rate, I can find nothing in mouse setting screen that relates to the question of how long the OS interprets a mouse button held down counts multiple clicks. Any ideas?
Does it only happen on this message board? It sometimes happens to me too, on my phone, so no mouse clicking involved. I always just assumed it was the site glitching.
It happens everywhere. Most annoyingly on Spelling Bee where I click on a letter and it appears 2 or even 3 times and I have to backspace. I’ve started using the keyboard instead. Incidentally, it does not happen on Wordle where a click is not effected until you release the mouse button. And it certainly happens when I am reading the online Times and is equally annoying.
You still haven’t told us your OS, but I will assume Windows. One of the most annoying things in Windows 10 (don’t know about 11) is the fact that there are two places for system settings, the “new” but regular one and the old system control panel that was carried over from Windows 7. Go to that panel, choose “Mouse”, then in the next dialog the tab “Buttons”. There you will find a section “Double Click Speed” where you can change that speed to your liking. Looks like that:
Yes, I had found that and put it to the slowest setting. But it seems to regulate how fast you can double click, rather than how fast clicks are generated when you simply hold the button down.
ETA: Mostly ninja-ed. So here’s the same stuff but with more pedantic detail. …
Mice do not generate multiple clicks while a button is held down. They simply don’t. Which is why you’re not finding a setting to change the rate at which that happens. Because by design it doesn’t happen. Not ever.
All the above applies to mice that are not malfunctioning.
If your mouse has developed a problem in the physical switch that engages when you push the mouse button, now the mouse can start to generate multiple separate clicks as the switch fails back and forth between open & closed. And does so potentially at a rate far higher than a human finger ever could.
In the process of trying @Miller’s suggestion of trying a different mouse, I got my wife’s mouse (while she wasn’t looking and it worked fine. Then I plugged mine back and guess what–it works fine now. From this I assume that something had gone wonky with the BIOS and unplugging the USB sensor caused it to reset and fix whatever was wrong.
To reply to @LSLGuy, while I accept your claim that mice do not generate multi-clicks, under certain conditions the BIOS may when you hold the mouse button down. Many years ago when my grandson was 5 or 6, he would sit on my lap and I would play Chips. When I held the mouse button down, it laid down a row of chips. Obviously, this is all done in software.
Yes. In this case, it’s not that the mouse is generating a stream of “mouse button down, mouse button up” events. It’s that the application received the single “mouse button down” and, until it receives the complementary “mouse button up” event, the software generates its own stream of internal events which looks as if the mouse is doing it.
