Vibration test
Three buzzes of different lengths. If none of them arrive, the section below is mostly about telling apart a broken motor from the several settings and one browser that silence it.
This browser does not support vibration. Safari on iPhone and iPad never has, so an iPhone will always land here — it is not a fault in your phone.
Hold the phone in your hand — a buzz is easy to miss on a table.
Did you feel the phone buzz?
Hold the phone while you test
A buzz on a desk is muffled and easy to miss, and a soft surface swallows it completely. Hold the phone in your hand for all three.
Short is a single tap, about a tenth of a second — the length used for a keyboard press.
Long is a solid buzz of most of a second, the length of a call alert.
Three pulses checks that the motor can stop and start cleanly. A motor on its way out often manages one long buzz but smears a pattern into a single blur, so this is the one that finds a weak one.
If nothing arrives
The order here matters, because the first item explains most of the cases.
- Are you on an iPhone? Then no web page can do this. Safari has never supported it and every iOS browser uses Safari underneath. Test through Settings, Sounds and Haptics instead.
- Silent mode or do not disturb. Both suppress vibration on many phones, including for a web page.
- Vibration intensity. Most Android phones have a slider, and it goes to zero.
- Battery saver. Widely disables haptics without saying so.
Only after those four is a failed motor the likely answer — and a motor that has come loose usually announces itself by rattling when you shake the phone gently.
What this test cannot tell you
It cannot measure strength, and it cannot distinguish a modern haptic engine from a simple rotating-weight motor. A browser can ask for a duration and nothing more. What it does establish is whether the motor responds at all, and whether it can produce a pattern rather than one continuous smear — which is enough to separate a fault from a setting.
Common questions
Nothing happens on my iPhone.
That is expected and it is not your phone. Safari has never implemented the web vibration interface, on any version of iOS, and every browser on iPhone is required to use Safari underneath — so Chrome and Firefox on an iPhone behave identically. No web page can vibrate an iPhone. To test the motor there, use the system: Settings, Sounds and Haptics, and move the ringer switch, which buzzes if the motor works.
Nothing happens on my Android.
Work through four things in order. Silent or do-not-disturb mode suppresses it on many devices. The vibration intensity setting may be at zero — Settings, Sounds, Vibration. Battery saver disables haptics on a lot of phones. And a browser tab that has not been interacted with will not be allowed to vibrate, though tapping the button here satisfies that.
It buzzes but very weakly.
Check the intensity setting first, since most phones have one and it is easy to have lowered. If it is at maximum and the buzz is still faint, a motor that has weakened is plausible — they wear, and a phone that has been dropped can have one partly detached, which usually also makes it rattle.
Why is there no way to test the strength?
Because a browser can only ask for a duration. There is no reading of what the motor actually did, no intensity control, and no feedback of any kind — the page asks for a buzz and hears nothing back. Any site claiming to measure vibration strength in a browser is inventing it.
Nothing happens on my computer.
Desktops have no vibration motor. Some browsers still report the interface as available and simply do nothing when it is called, which is why the buttons may look active on a machine that cannot possibly buzz.