Not nearly as nasty as scroll hijacking so the page moves at a different speed than what I've instructed it to move at. Or pastejacking - when you're trying to copy a piece of text and the page makes you grab an entirely different string to what you'd highlighted and selected.
Oh when you open an app to do a task and you get 5 new pop ups asking you to let them show you the new tool. Like, no. I don't have the bandwith right now. i'ld love to look at them but you chose the worse time. And then you can never go back to see what the tutorial was on the new feature.
Especially egregious when preventing pasting into a password field. Do they want me to have a weak password so that I can manually type it in instead of pasting it from a password manager?
Focus-stealing, too! Especially bad with Microsoft products. I can picture exactly what happened: a thousand complaints of "I lost a window in the heaping mess of open work on my desktop" each turned into a ticket to add Just One More focus steal until the first minute of a Microsoft-powered desktop's existence is various projects fighting in a brawl to repeatedly steal focus from one another.
It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.
Problem it isn't an API, it is just unexpected consequences of how a few things work. Fixing this just isn't easy as the simple attempts will break even more than the frustrating thing you are trying to fix - and thus be worse.
That said, Microsoft should have fixed this long ago - it is hard but a few people can do it given a few years to work through all the special cases.
Not just frustrating, it's a security hole. Stealing focus means a user may expect to be typing a password but find it's inputted somewhere they did not expect.
Or right-click hijacking. e.g. Discord's web app, where I might want to right click a link in a message to copy it. But instead, Discord forces their own right-click menu with no such option.
I remember when the internet was wild, young and fun, and this was something people did all the time. If you’re building Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft Word you should avoid it, but if you’re making a fun and weird website you should go to town.
Those overgrown webapps do indeed avoid changing the pointer. But the back button is their special place to go to town with. Businesses pay enormous amounts of money for a piece of crap that breaks the effing back button.
Yeah, it's not really that it's difficult and AI has made it easier. It's super easy, it's just anybody who knows what they're doing learned that it's bad decades ago.
Vibe coding didn't make it easier to change the cursor, it made it easier for incompetent people to write software.
The cursor icon is useful as an indicator of function - e.g. the "I" styled character over text (where you can select/highlight then copy), and the "hand" icon to indicate a link.
Being able to change the cursor to indicate a behaviour can be beneficial, especially with dynamic DOM elements.
Going rogue with mouse cursor icons is a UX minefield though, and it's usually done without any UX assessment of the impact.
The bad example has significant lag compared to the good.
Also, except when the pointer is over something, it isn't actually a pointer so you might not be able to position it precisely onto something. While trying to position it over something small⁰ it is going to cover the target making the process partially guesswork.
--------
[0] ignoring for a moment that something so small is likely bad UX in itself, like the single-pixel¹ border drag targets and scrollbars found on many things these days
[1] see similar discussions over in the thread about older UIs at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428 for this and related issues - even when we have far fewer pixels on the screen a single pixel wide/tall/both target was often considered bad form.
I use a very large mouse cursor because I hate when I have to search for the thing. Sometimes during meetings I get brain dead comments about it. I make it bigger in spite when I get a comment about it. Then in meetings they complain that they can't find their mouse pointer.... /rant
Looks like that one changes the pointer with javascript. I guess the only options are to not permit Javascript which breaks the site or use Reader View. Cntrl+Alt+R in Firefox.
> For example, making it slightly tilted because it was easier to draw on old screens.
No. Some older systems actually had straight pointers. The slightly tilted design is, I assume, a result of wanting to point to something while still being able to see what is to the immediate left of the pointer; useful for left-to-right text.
I like it how the author says how busy he is and how he finally snatched a few minutes out of this busy life to bring us this edict: don't hijack mouse pointers, or else!
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.
Google's design blog has a particularly egregious version of this: https://design.google/
The mouse blob morphs into the background of any buttons you hover over, which is technically impressive but annoying in practice
Wow, so much for "Google Design". It's probably one of the worst designed pages I've seen recently.
wow, this is one of the worst pages I've seen
Not nearly as nasty as scroll hijacking so the page moves at a different speed than what I've instructed it to move at. Or pastejacking - when you're trying to copy a piece of text and the page makes you grab an entirely different string to what you'd highlighted and selected.
Oh when you open an app to do a task and you get 5 new pop ups asking you to let them show you the new tool. Like, no. I don't have the bandwith right now. i'ld love to look at them but you chose the worse time. And then you can never go back to see what the tutorial was on the new feature.
I'd add preventing text selection, right-clicking or pasting from the clipboard to the list. I hate when websites do that.
Especially egregious when preventing pasting into a password field. Do they want me to have a weak password so that I can manually type it in instead of pasting it from a password manager?
There's an old, but good, set of browser plugins called "don't fuck with paste" that helps a little, at least.
Setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in about:config to false will prevent sites from messing with cut and paste.
In Firefox
Brave actually added a force paste option recently for such cases.
Focus-stealing, too! Especially bad with Microsoft products. I can picture exactly what happened: a thousand complaints of "I lost a window in the heaping mess of open work on my desktop" each turned into a ticket to add Just One More focus steal until the first minute of a Microsoft-powered desktop's existence is various projects fighting in a brawl to repeatedly steal focus from one another.
It was a major win for the internet that it took this power away from the application layer.
I have often thought about trying to figure out whatever Win32 API is responsible for focus stealing and neuter it down to something akin to
It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.Problem it isn't an API, it is just unexpected consequences of how a few things work. Fixing this just isn't easy as the simple attempts will break even more than the frustrating thing you are trying to fix - and thus be worse.
That said, Microsoft should have fixed this long ago - it is hard but a few people can do it given a few years to work through all the special cases.
Not just frustrating, it's a security hole. Stealing focus means a user may expect to be typing a password but find it's inputted somewhere they did not expect.
Spacebar hijacking, it is how I scroll webpages
Or right-click hijacking. e.g. Discord's web app, where I might want to right click a link in a message to copy it. But instead, Discord forces their own right-click menu with no such option.
Slack does this with links (they all point to Slack instead of the URL in the message) and it drives me nuts.
Same in Discord, crappy apps.
My other pet peeve is sites that override text selection and add a popup or something.
I select long text when I'm reading, I use it for focus and to keep track where I was if I need to switch to some other task in the middle.
In general, excessive customization is a net negative if it breaks expectations.
I remember when the internet was wild, young and fun, and this was something people did all the time. If you’re building Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft Word you should avoid it, but if you’re making a fun and weird website you should go to town.
Those overgrown webapps do indeed avoid changing the pointer. But the back button is their special place to go to town with. Businesses pay enormous amounts of money for a piece of crap that breaks the effing back button.
Yeah, it's not really that it's difficult and AI has made it easier. It's super easy, it's just anybody who knows what they're doing learned that it's bad decades ago.
Vibe coding didn't make it easier to change the cursor, it made it easier for incompetent people to write software.
I can count on my left hand the number of acceptable times to change my cursor motion or shape. This is one: https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/
Your choice of wording made me wonder if you have a different number of fingers on left and right hands.
I find it a bit surprising that there is no option in a browser to stop this kind of behavior. There is even a suggestion on mozzila.org.
With this option placed it would just be another 'fun thing' you don't need to mind.
The cursor icon is useful as an indicator of function - e.g. the "I" styled character over text (where you can select/highlight then copy), and the "hand" icon to indicate a link.
Being able to change the cursor to indicate a behaviour can be beneficial, especially with dynamic DOM elements.
Going rogue with mouse cursor icons is a UX minefield though, and it's usually done without any UX assessment of the impact.
> For example it can be as simple as this, to something completely unacceptable as this.
I can't see any difference between these in terms of UX - I got annoyed just looking at them.
The bad example has significant lag compared to the good.
Also, except when the pointer is over something, it isn't actually a pointer so you might not be able to position it precisely onto something. While trying to position it over something small⁰ it is going to cover the target making the process partially guesswork.
--------
[0] ignoring for a moment that something so small is likely bad UX in itself, like the single-pixel¹ border drag targets and scrollbars found on many things these days
[1] see similar discussions over in the thread about older UIs at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104428 for this and related issues - even when we have far fewer pixels on the screen a single pixel wide/tall/both target was often considered bad form.
Lol, once made a game hiding mouse pointer temporarely when users did not behave :)
That's not "hijacking your mouse pointer" that's just changing the cursor.
Absolutely change my cursor. But to something that looks cool, like a dragon or a sword. Not to a circle.
This. Hijacking the pointer in the browser is also possible. There are webgl games that do it.
I use a very large mouse cursor because I hate when I have to search for the thing. Sometimes during meetings I get brain dead comments about it. I make it bigger in spite when I get a comment about it. Then in meetings they complain that they can't find their mouse pointer.... /rant
Edge browser repositions your mouse cursor when you use the built-in screenshot tool.
Instant tab closed.
ublock may be able to help, perhaps something like
Does anyone have a site to test it on?Try https://dmnsgn.me/blog/from-glsl-to-wgsl-the-future-of-shade...
Looks like that one changes the pointer with javascript. I guess the only options are to not permit Javascript which breaks the site or use Reader View. Cntrl+Alt+R in Firefox.
Ouch, that is awful.
> For example, making it slightly tilted because it was easier to draw on old screens.
No. Some older systems actually had straight pointers. The slightly tilted design is, I assume, a result of wanting to point to something while still being able to see what is to the immediate left of the pointer; useful for left-to-right text.
Unless it’s Ratty
Wait...what year is it again?
Wake up babe, it's 1999 and you need to install Yahoo Toolbar into Netscape Navigator to avoid the dreaded Y2K bug!
I like it how the author says how busy he is and how he finally snatched a few minutes out of this busy life to bring us this edict: don't hijack mouse pointers, or else!
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.