41–50 of 63 posts
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 void steal_focus_when_user_is_least_expecting() { // stub, much better :) } It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 void steal_focus_when_user_is_least_expecting() { // stub, much better :) } It is the single most frustrating desktop computing experience.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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 :)