Middle click failure plagues nearly every mouse I’ve owned, OEM, Logitech, wired, or wireless. I take full advantage of the middle click shortcuts like opening links in new tabs, but I don’t think I’m putting it through undue stress either. As far as I can tell, I’m clicking it with the same force as I would the other mouse buttons and much less frequently than the left click.
Failure usually starts with occasional missed middle clicks, which after some point, rapidly progresses until it’s failing to register more often than not. At that point, everything else will still work perfectly. No improvement even if I take it apart to clean out what little dirt had accumulated.
One of my mice has managed to avoid this fate far longer than the others but I’ve just recently stopped using it due to the rubberized exterior turning all gooey and sticky. The only middle mouse buttons that seem immune to all of this are the ones on ThinkPads. Anyone else notice this or could recommend a good mouse that can stand up to a bit of middle-clicking?
Nope. The he only issues I’ve ever had were with the left button.
I got a mouse like a year ago from a brand called Rapoo (never heard of them), and it was a solid mouse that supported standard dongle wireless as well as BT, and it is quite nice ergonomically compared to the Logitech one I’ve got for another computer.
Then I started having issues with left click, with it surprisingly often clicking twice (or more) or not clicking at all, which is causing me to accidentally close every app open just because it double/triple/quadruple clicked somehow. Then there’s middle click, which works slightly better, it only skips sometimes, but the Logitech mentioned earlier is the one I heavily use middle click (since I close and open browser tabs using it very often), and that one is pretty close to actually just failing.
Not sure why, but the most recent mice have just worked like shit, with both of these being brand new. As a comparison, I’ve got 2 Microsoft arc touch mice (the old one with a dedicated touchpad for the scroll area but not the buttons,) and I used both for school, with friends snapping it between their postures hundreds of times out of curiosity, which they’ve sustained really well, and no buttons have gotten issues apart from the touchpad of one of them, which likes to deactivate when I scroll too much which is plain inconvenient.
The first mouse that failed on me failed because my cat chewed the cable and damaged it. I recently had my 2nd mouse failure, my Kensington wireless trackball died. Seems to be a power issue. I think I can fix it, we’ll see. Never had a mouse button fail on me yet.
Nope. I never use it. And I honestly never use the side buttons it has either.
Nope, it’s either right click or the goddamn scroll that fails.
The middle scroll wheel on my mouse creaks like a 19th century door while scrolling and clicking, and of course not repairable…
I’ve killed dozens of mice and in every single one, left-clicking was the first to break.
No, that’s not something that I’ve ever noticed. It never happened with any mouse I had before (even though I had a few mice fail mechanically in other ways in the past) and 17 years ago I bought two (one for home, one for the office) of the classic HP 3-button optical USB mice, which I’ve used more or less daily ever since without anything ever failing:
I find it somewhat hard to imagine that these mice could ever fail in any way, and even harder to imagine why the middle button would in any way be different from the two outer buttons.
The most common mouse problem I experience is when the left click or right click buttons intermittently double click on a single click. The second most common problem is when a button won’t stay “down” when I’m holding down the button, causing erratic drag-and-drop behaviour. I’ve actually never experienced your middle click problem.
That’s what’s happening to my mouse right now! Should I buy another?
If it’s a problem caused by hardware, you’ll either want to repair or replace. It’s probably fixable by replacing the mouse switches but that usually requires some soldering.
I’ve fixed this several times with a bit of thick tape. It wasn’t actually the button that had worn down, but the plastic stub that pressed it. A bit of extra material kept each working for months/years after.
My current mouse has this fix over a year back, and is still working reliably.
100% of my failed Logitech mouses were left clicks.
If I had to take a guess, it’s probably the most complex mechanical part in a mouse. The other buttons don’t have the added extra movements. I’ve had the same Razor Deathadder for like 15 years, still going strong. I’m just glad they don’t have actual rolling balls in them anymore.
I seem to always kill m1 and get a new mouse every 5 years
Yup, for me it is the middle click the reason I’m buying new mice.
Tho I don’t think many people are actually aware of the utility of the roller click. This is why I usually pass the broken ones down to my family lolFor me, yes
