Don't hijack my mouse pointer

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.

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'd add preventing text selection, right-clicking or pasting from the clipboard to the list. I hate when websites do that.

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.

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

Wow i didn't know Google did this as well, that's pretty sad.

Don't forget if you copy and paste it you end up with extra bullshit you didn't copy...

Read more at: http://example.troll/lolyoufellforit.html

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.

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.

Your choice of wording made me wonder if you have a different number of fingers on left and right hands.

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.

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[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.

[delayed]

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.

Try https://dmnsgn.me/blog/from-glsl-to-wgsl-the-future-of-shade...

The best video on mouse cursors I've seen, by Posy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg

It doesn't exactly answer the question, but I -- someone who doesn't watch video and wants text, articles -- have watched this video twice over. It's worth it :)

This. Hijacking the pointer in the browser is also possible. There are webgl games that do it.

Wake up babe, it's 1999 and you need to install Yahoo Toolbar into Netscape Navigator to avoid the dreaded Y2K bug!