alt.hn

5/12/2026 at 12:00:55 PM

Don't hijack my mouse pointer

 https://ruky.me/dont-hijack-my-pointer/

by rukshn

5/12/2026 at 12:48:49 PM

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.

by venzaspa

5/12/2026 at 1:36:28 PM

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.

by T_Potato

5/12/2026 at 1:06:30 PM

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.

by smallmancontrov

5/12/2026 at 1:17:01 PM

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.

by datenyan

5/12/2026 at 1:56:55 PM

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.

by bluGill

5/12/2026 at 1:56:23 PM

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.

by dleslie

5/12/2026 at 12:59:03 PM

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

by newscombinatorY

5/12/2026 at 1:15:36 PM

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?

by stvltvs

5/12/2026 at 1:41:13 PM

There's an old, but good, set of browser plugins called "don't fuck with paste" that helps a little, at least.

by michaelcampbell

5/12/2026 at 1:48:40 PM

Setting dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in about:config to false will prevent sites from messing with cut and paste.

by antiframe

5/12/2026 at 1:54:48 PM

In Firefox

by LoganDark

5/12/2026 at 1:44:11 PM

Brave actually added a force paste option recently for such cases.

by LorenDB

5/12/2026 at 1:51:18 PM

Spacebar hijacking, it is how I scroll webpages

by shultays

5/12/2026 at 1:43:33 PM

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.

by LorenDB

5/12/2026 at 1:41:25 PM

Slack does this with links (they all point to Slack instead of the URL in the message) and it drives me nuts.

by cmiles74

5/12/2026 at 1:48:40 PM

Same in Discord, crappy apps.

by pezgrande

5/12/2026 at 1:52:56 PM

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

by matteason

5/12/2026 at 1:57:25 PM

Wow, so much for "Google Design". It's probably one of the worst designed pages I've seen recently.

by reddalo

5/12/2026 at 5:09:03 PM

I 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.

by ASalazarMX

5/12/2026 at 1:55:23 PM

wow, this is one of the worst pages I've seen

by sozforex

5/12/2026 at 2:08:27 PM

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

by rukshn

5/12/2026 at 1:43:21 PM

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.

by juancn

5/13/2026 at 4:39:42 AM

In 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.

by array_key_first

5/12/2026 at 2:43:24 PM

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

by kotaKat

5/12/2026 at 3:18:25 PM

Ohh you also made me think of those forms that disable paste!

by juancn

5/12/2026 at 1:06:19 PM

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/

by xnx

5/12/2026 at 1:10:08 PM

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

by chrismorgan

5/12/2026 at 5:21:36 PM

They're using their right hand to operate their cursor.

by BobaFloutist

5/12/2026 at 1:26:44 PM

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.

by clickety_clack

5/12/2026 at 1:36:55 PM

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.

by thesuitonym

5/12/2026 at 4:32:33 PM

I'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.

by clickety_clack

5/12/2026 at 1:56:57 PM

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.

by tosti

5/12/2026 at 6:53:27 PM

These 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...

allows you to throw the focus around,in the browser.

example of WinAPI 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-mou...

JS example of manipulating the mouse:

https://shyama.com/automating-mouse-clicks-and-movements-wit...

by rolph

5/12/2026 at 12:25:01 PM

> 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.

by frereubu

5/12/2026 at 1:48:57 PM

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.

by dspillett

5/12/2026 at 1:42:15 PM

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.

by nfbs

5/12/2026 at 1:51:47 PM

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.

by manarth

5/12/2026 at 2:03:01 PM

Ah, 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.

by nfbs

5/12/2026 at 1:20:49 PM

Lol, once made a game hiding mouse pointer temporarely when users did not behave :)

by noiv

5/12/2026 at 6:16:50 PM

As a millenial I sure am glad for AI to be blamed for everything, instead of my generation.

by sig-11

5/13/2026 at 1:32:26 AM

Can't wait to see articles on how ai is killing the napkin industry

by paradox460

5/12/2026 at 2:22:22 PM

Try using RISC OS on the Archimedes if you want some really obnoxious mouse pointer hijacking.

by sys_64738

5/12/2026 at 3:23:51 PM

remind me...

by gjvc

5/12/2026 at 1:34:23 PM

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

by T_Potato

5/12/2026 at 12:29:05 PM

ublock may be able to help, perhaps something like

    ##*:style(cursor: auto !important)
Does anyone have a site to test it on?

by Bender

5/12/2026 at 1:09:35 PM

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

by shrx

5/12/2026 at 1:21:40 PM

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.

by Bender

5/12/2026 at 1:42:09 PM

Ouch, that is awful.

by michaelcampbell

5/12/2026 at 5:51:28 PM

I 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.

by dizhn

5/12/2026 at 1:05:12 PM

> 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.

by teddyh

5/12/2026 at 12:28:42 PM

Unless it’s Ratty

by spacebacon

5/12/2026 at 1:47:07 PM

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.

by AlienRobot

5/12/2026 at 1:50:55 PM

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

by tosti

5/12/2026 at 1:43:14 PM

Edge browser repositions your mouse cursor when you use the built-in screenshot tool.

by sixothree

5/12/2026 at 1:36:05 PM

Instant tab closed.

by crest

5/12/2026 at 12:44:36 PM

Wait...what year is it again?

by timw4mail

5/12/2026 at 1:13:24 PM

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

by smallmancontrov

5/12/2026 at 12:54:47 PM

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.

by Theodores