Frustrating cursor change behavior...

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Level 1

10 points

Frustrating cursor change behavior...

I've been getting a strange and very annoying Safari-connected behavior for months now and haven't been able to find the culprit. The behavior is that the "default" mouse cursor state becomes an arrow combined with a gray rectangle:

What's more, the contact/origin point for that cursor isn't the tip of the arrow, but the middle of the graphic, between the back end of the arrow and the rectangle. Lots of fun trying to click things while this is happening. Oh, and it happens in ALL applications that use the default mouse cursor, not just Safari. I know that it's coming *from* Safari because it goes away when I quit that app and comes back when I launch it again. It is not related to Extensions - I can turn them off and restart the app, and again I get this behavior.

For awhile I was attributing this behavior to Google Spreadsheets, since it seemed like I could close them or move them to my secondary monitor and the problem would go away, but this morning I seem to have eliminated that from the list of possible conflicts - even when I close all Spreadsheets, the problem remains.

Has anyone else seen this? I haven't found any descriptions of problems matching this on the web.

Posted on May 12, 2015 8:50 AM

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Answer 1

Whitfield G Author

Level 1

10 points

May 12, 2015 9:05 AM in response to Whitfield G

Quick update: I just discovered that I seem to be able to "activate" the behavior (at least at the current moment - this thing is wily, and I don't think this is always the case) by tapping the Command key, then it disappears when the mouse switches to anything else by rolling an element like text. Perhaps that cursor icon is for the "open tab behind" behavior? Even so, it's a non-Retina cursor and the origin point would be annoying if that was the intended use.

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Answer 2

Whitfield G Author

Level 1

10 points

May 26, 2015 2:43 PM in response to Whitfield G

Quick follow-up/solution for anyone who comes across this issue: after searching on the net for similar symptoms, I finally discovered that it was a plugin issue (funny, these days I always think of extensions instead of plugins when it comes to browser modification, even though there are dozens of the latter installed on my computer). Specifically, it was something in this batch of plugins:

AdobeAAMDetect.plugin

AdobeExManDetect.plugin

AdobePDFViewer.plugin

AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin

I removed them and restarted the browser, which killed the bizarre cursor issue (thank god), then tried freshly reinstalling Adobe Reader DC, which left behind the latter two plugins, so it seems likely that the former two are legacy plugins that are no longer relevant.

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