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ever since I upgraded to mountain lion my cursor changed shape from an arrow to "cross hairs." How do I get it back to an arrow?

Ever since upgrading to mountain lion my cursor has changed from an arrow to "cross hairs." This oocurs not only in safari but other programs. sometimes it's an arrow sometimes it's a cross hair. For example, in this forum when I move the cursor over the tabs "store" "mac" "ipod" "iphone" etc sometimes the cursor is an arrow and then it changes to cross hairs. In the body of the page it is always a cross hair even when i scroll over hyperlinks. I've restarted my computer a few times and sometimes the arrow comes back - but only for a short period of time and then it's back to the cross hairs which I find quite anoying. Any idea how to get teh cursor to stay as an arrow? For what it's worth, the cursor always stays as an arrow as long as I'm on the tabs I have open or any area above them. As I said, this doesn't happen just in Safari, it also happens in other programs like Word.


Cheers,


Dave

Posted on Aug 6, 2012 8:49 AM

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29 replies

Aug 7, 2012 8:31 AM in response to wheresdavid

I'm having this problem too for the past few days (didn't notice it when I first upgraded to Moutain Lion but it just started 2 days ago), but have only noticed it in Safari so far - my cursor turns to a crosshair whenever I mouse over a link or any interactive element. Restarting doesn't help.


EDIT: Just checked again, it's doing it in other programs now too, same as yours.

Aug 7, 2012 9:16 AM in response to wheresdavid

Just did some experimenting and I fixed it on my computer! My pointer is back to normal!


For me, the problem was caused by the Adobe PDF Viewer plugin in Safari. I noticed that when I would hit F3 for Expose, there was a blank window that said "Adobe PDF Viewer" attached to Safari, but when I tried to click on the window to open it, nothing would happen. I figured this might be causing my issue.


Then I found out that theAdobe PDF plugins aren't supported on the new versions of Safari, so I uninstalled them. Here's how:


1. Go to the folder : Your Hard Drive / Library / Internet Plug-ins.

2. If you see the files AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin and AdobePDFViewer.plugin, drag them to the trash.

3. Restart Safari. Pointer issue should be fixed.


I hope this helps!!

Oct 23, 2013 10:09 AM in response to 829z

Thanks, 829z, for your clear instructions about deleting the two adobe plugins. You were the only resource I found on the Internet to solve this annoying "crosshairs" problem that suddenly appeared today. Really do appreciate folks like you who take the time to help the rest of us!


(I wonder how in the world you managed to figure that out!)

ever since I upgraded to mountain lion my cursor changed shape from an arrow to "cross hairs." How do I get it back to an arrow?

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