11 ms·
Don't hijack my mouse pointer
- frereubu 5mo ago> 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.
- dspillett 5mo agoThe 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 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.
- spacebacon 5mo agoUnless it’s Ratty
- Bender 5mo agoublock may be able to help, perhaps something like ##*:style(cursor: auto !important) Does anyone have a site to test it on?
- shrx 5mo agoTry https://dmnsgn.me/blog/from-glsl-to-wgsl-the-future-of-shaders-on-the-web/ https://dmnsgn.me/blog/from-glsl-to-wgsl-the-future-of-shade...
- Bender 5mo agoLooks 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.
- michaelcampbell 5mo agoOuch, that is awful.
- timw4mail 5mo agoWait...what year is it again?
- smallmancontrov 5mo agoWake up babe, it's 1999 and you need to install Yahoo Toolbar into Netscape Navigator to avoid the dreaded Y2K bug!
- venzaspa 5mo agoNot 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.
- newscombinatorY 5mo agoI'd add preventing text selection, right-clicking or pasting from the clipboard to the list. I hate when websites do that.
- michaelcampbell 5mo agoThere's an old, but good, set of browser plugins called "don't fuck with paste" that helps a little, at least.
- stvltvs 5mo agoEspecially 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?
- LorenDB 5mo agoBrave actually added a force paste option recently for such cases.
- smallmancontrov 5mo ago
- Theodores 5mo agoI 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- teddyh 5mo ago> 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.
- vintagedave 5mo agoThe best video on mouse cursors I've seen, by Posy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg 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 :)
- vintagedave 5mo agoIn fact, I'll post on HN, it's so good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48108704
- xnx 5mo agoI 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/ https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/
- chrismorgan 5mo agoYour choice of wording made me wonder if you have a different number of fingers on left and right hands.
- BobaFloutist 5mo agoThey're using their right hand to operate their cursor.
- noiv 5mo agoLol, once made a game hiding mouse pointer temporarely when users did not behave :)
- clickety_clack 5mo agoI 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.
- thesuitonym 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- clickety_clack 5mo agoI'd agree with you if people didn't complain about "dead internet theory" all the time. The internet used to be a wonderful place full of weird, unexpected stuff. Now it's all shopping websites, attention sucking addiction machines, blogs about what people do for work, and corporate data management. If that's what you're working on, you should stay within the lines and do all the stuff with the back button rules and the cursor rules and the color rules and the font rules and the animation rules and the sound rules etc. etc. I'd love to see more people violating the design guidelines more often so that the internet can become a place worth visiting again, full of all the weird and wonderful ideas that people have locked up in their heads.
- tosti 5mo agoThose 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.
- T_Potato 5mo agoI 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
- crest 5mo agoInstant tab closed.
- nfbs 5mo agoI 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.
- manarth 5mo agoThe 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.
- nfbs 5mo agoAh, yes. I'm sorry. I think i was not precise enough. This is certainly a wanted feature. I meant the ability for a website to change the cursor on its behalf, regardless of elements used or objects on the site. Context sensitive behavior on elements is something that should not be affected with said option.
- sixothree 5mo agoEdge browser repositions your mouse cursor when you use the built-in screenshot tool.
- juancn 5mo agoMy 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.
- kotaKat 5mo agoDon'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 http://example.troll/lolyoufellforit.html
- juancn 5mo agoOhh you also made me think of those forms that disable paste!
- array_key_first 5mo agoIn general, customization is a net negative. There was a time when apps just used native OS controls for everything, and it was way better. Sure branding was lost, but that's not my problem. Most apps are generic, they should act like it.
- AlienRobot 5mo agoThat'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.
- tosti 5mo agoThis. Hijacking the pointer in the browser is also possible. There are webgl games that do it.
- matteason 5mo agoGoogle's design blog has a particularly egregious version of this: https://design.google/ https://design.google/ The mouse blob morphs into the background of any buttons you hover over, which is technically impressive but annoying in practice
- sozforex 5mo agowow, this is one of the worst pages I've seen
- reddalo 5mo agoWow, so much for "Google Design". It's probably one of the worst designed pages I've seen recently.
- rukshn 5mo agoWow i didn't know Google did this as well, that's pretty sad.
- ASalazarMX 5mo agoI thought, how bad it could be? It's actually very annoying since it doesn't even follow your mouse acceleration profile, the fancy cursor just does its own thing. It's a minor inconvenience, but very jarring at first.
- sys_64738 5mo agoTry using RISC OS on the Archimedes if you want some really obnoxious mouse pointer hijacking.
- gjvc 5mo agoremind me...
- dizhn 5mo agoI encountered a few sites that can actually pull off "Hit ESC to enable video" even with ublock origin. I think they are using some sort of game controller api. Haven't encountered anything more infuriating in terms browsers and input device and haven't found a solution to it.
- sig-11 5mo agoAs a millenial I sure am glad for AI to be blamed for everything, instead of my generation.
- paradox460 5mo agoCan't wait to see articles on how ai is killing the napkin industry
- rolph 5mo agoThese are alllegitimate techniques,but have great potential for abuse/leakingoff the user. from the other side of the coin, these are some of the ways it was/still is done. example of browser element focus: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/focus https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement... allows you to throw the focus around,in the browser. example of WinAPI SetFocus : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/nf-winuser-setfocus https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... allows you to throw the focus around in the OS JS example of mouse as a trigger event: https://www.w3docs.com/learn-javascript/moving-the-mouse-mouseover-out-mouseenter-leave.html https://www.w3docs.com/learn-javascript/moving-the-mouse-mou... JS example of manipulating the mouse: https://shyama.com/automating-mouse-clicks-and-movements-with-javascript/ https://shyama.com/automating-mouse-clicks-and-movements-wit...
- redanddead 5mo agoCodex's computer use was nice bc it didn't hijack your mouse. Idk why Claude thought it'd be a good idea to do computer-use that way. It's such bad UX, hoping Claude does something new/better we'll see