571245 - Add a shadow to the pointer cursor on MacOS X

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect)

Description

[Daniel Spiewak]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3

When mousing over links, the cursor changes to a pointer hand.  This is expected behavior.  However, the pointer cursor is slightly different from the native Cocoa pointer hand.  This can be seen by viewing a web page in Safari (or Chrome, actually) and in Firefox 3.6.  Mouse over a link in both browsers.  The native pointer (in Safari or Chrome) has a slight shadow and is somewhat anti-aliased, while the pointer in Firefox has no shadow and has visibly-jagged lines.  This is a subtle disruption to the user experience and makes Firefox feel less like a native Mac application.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Mouse over a link

Actual Results:  
Cursor was not the native pointer.


I'm not sure why Firefox *isn't* using the native pointer.  It's just another "papercut" that undermines the user experience in a subtle and almost imperceptible way.

Comment 1

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

In fact, Firefox *is* using the native cursor ([NSCursor pointingHandCursor]). Webkit uses a custom image: http://trac.webkit.org/export/60969/trunk/WebCore/Resources/linkCursor.png

Still, theirs looks nicer, it would be good to use it.

Comment 2

[Daniel Spiewak]

Interesting.  I didn't realize that WebKit was being nonstandard.  It's sort of an interesting philosophical question then: is it better to be strictly native (as WebKit *should* be), or blend a bit better with user expectations and use the non-standard pointer?

Comment 3

[Andrew Thompson]

What license are these images under? Nothing we could use, I expect.

Comment 4

[Daniel Spiewak]

WebKit's licenses are...complex.  Bits of it are GPL, bits are LGPL and some very tiny bits are BSD.  They don't seem to specify which license applies to the images, but I would assume the worst and guess GPL (which we can't use).

I also noticed that Colloquy uses the same "enhanced" cursor, but its UI is quite certainly licensed under GPL, so that's a no-go.  I don't know any other products off-hand which use the cursor, but it might be worth digging a bit.  There's an outside possibility that WebKit's images *are* BSD licensed, but I can't confirm or deny it at present.

Comment 5

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Gerv, do you know if we're allowed to import that image from Webkit?

If we're not, we can just add the drop shadow ourselves... though we'd need the shadow-less hand cursor as an image first, for example from here:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/cocoa/reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSCursor_Class/Reference/Art/point_hand.gif
... and then we'd have the same problem.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The repo itself doesn't make it clear what is under what license. Wikipedia says that "WebCore" is LGPLed, and this cursor:
http://trac.webkit.org/export/60969/trunk/WebCore/Resources/linkCursor.png
is in the WebCore directory, so without any more specific guidance we'd have to assume it was LGPLed.

At the moment, we don't take LGPL-only code into the tree. :-|

If someone were to find a way of freeing or BSD-ing the cursor image, we could take it.

Here's the bug:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11112
You could ask the guy who made it if he'd be willing to license the updated cursor to us... But it was probably based on the previous cursor, which was originally a TIFF, which was checked in 8 years ago:
http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/Resources/linkCursor.tiff?rev=10000
"haircut" may well be the code name for some Apple release.

So the copyright in the original icon probably belongs to Apple, and because it's in WebCore, it's probably LGPL.

Gerv

Comment 7

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Thanks Gerv!

(In reply to comment #6)
> So the copyright in the original icon probably belongs to Apple

Does that mean that we would have to ask Apple directly to free the image?

Comment 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Markus: unless you can prove either that it's under the BSD licence or that someone else is the copyright holder, yes.

Gerv

Comment 9

[LegNeato]

I've reached out to Apple about this.

Comment 10

[Daniel Spiewak]

This has been fixed in some recent builds (I believe in 8, but definitely in 9).

Comment 11

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

I don't think it was fixed in Firefox but rather in Mac OS X.

Comment 12

[philippe (part-time)]

(In reply to Markus Stange from comment #11)
> I don't think it was fixed in Firefox but rather in Mac OS X.

That would be a 10.7-only fix then. Recent nightlies on 10.6.8 have the same cursor as always.