A good example is in the paint widget at the beginning of this article - none of those cursors exist natively in any browser. There may not be a built-in cursor for the use-case you need to solve.Using custom cursors, you can implement all of these in all browsers. For example, while Firefox on Windows doesn’t support context-menu, it seems to be the only browser that supports the zoom-in and -out cursors. Not all browsers support all the same “built-in” cursors, and custom cursors allows you to add support for them.Mouse over the object draggable object below to see how this works. To give users a visual cue that an item is draggable, it is common practice to set an object’s CSS cursor property to move. Let’s take a look at an example that doesn’t use custom cursors to illustrate a common use-case: drag and drop.

In general, CSS cursors (built-in or custom) should be used as a hint to the user as to what action the mouse can perform. When Should I Use Custom Cursors Instead of the Built-in Ones? We will also explore issues such as when to use custom cursors, performance, what makes good cursor design, cursor file formats, and cursor size. However, doing this in a cross browser way can be a little confusing unless you know all the gotchas, and this article will go into depth about them.

When used properly, custom CSS cursors can add a little bit of polish to your web sites and applications. This is not done by creating a DOM object and moving it to the mouse’s coordinates - we are using CSS to do it using the cursor property’s url() function.

When you select a tool and mouse over the white canvas, your mouse arrow will change to a custom cursor representing that tool (à la Photoshop or The GIMP). If you are using a desktop browser (except for Opera), play with the paint widget on the left. Paint widget a remix of CanvasPainter © Rafael Robayna

Custom cursor image windows 7