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?
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.