"To be added (Please, go ahead!) [...] Cursor Trail"
This was an OS feature (and still is, at least on Win7), rather than a cheesy webpage effect. The browser was never allowed to know what the cursor looks like, so it's impossible for webpages to implement a native-looking mouse trail that works consistently.
The OS mouse trail was super useful on LCD screens with sluggish pixels: without it, the cursor would be essentially invisible if you moved the mouse too fast. Couldn't use my NEC Ready 120LT without this feature!
> The OS mouse trail was super useful on LCD screens with sluggish pixels: without it, the cursor would be essentially invisible if you moved the mouse too fast.
It's also (still) super useful for visually impaired users.
I've also found it very useful to bend VmWare Fusion to my will -- between Windows in the guest, VmWare and the OSX host (with high-res / Retina screens), the cursor is often "off" relative to the actual pointer... until I enable the trail in Windows, at which point everything works properly. I have no idea why.
Most cursor glitches end up being a mismatch between hardware-drawn cursors and software-rendered. Turning the trails on forces Windows to draw the cursor in software, which puts the cursor much earlier in the graphics pipeline and makes it much more accessible to other things like f.lux or apparently Fusion's integration.
I have fond memories of the "Elastic Bullets" trail (all the cool kids had it on their websites).
Most of my early javascript snippets came from javascript.internet.com [1], but I found a copy on yaldex [2]. More classics available there and javascript-fx.com [3]
Suggestion: search through the Geocity, Tripod, ... archives that survived and use Archive.org
About mouse cursors and effects: Windows 95 Plus CD contained many desktop themes incl various themed cursor, background wallpapers, animated screensaver. Wonderful for its time.
This brought back memories from old times: I can remember copying some Javascript code to a forum I used to manage to get snow flakes to fall on the screen (during christmas). I loved the effect!
I know this is probably a losing battle, but I have to try: The cursor is the text insertion point. The thing that moves when you move the mouse and is arrow-shaped by default is correctly called the pointer.
> The Mouse: The little rectangular object with three buttons that usually sits to the right of the keyboard is called a mouse. Move it around while watching the screen. An arrow (mouse cursor) will be moving in response to it. This is how we point to objects on the screen.
> Graphical input. The user is provided with a "mouse," a coordinate input device with three pushbuttons. The mouse rolls along a table top and is tracked by a cursor that moves on the screen. The mouse can thus be used to point to objects already displayed on the screen, or simply to identify a coordinate position.
> The state of mouse input is reflected by the cursor tracked by the mouse as it is moved. Usually, the cursor is an arrow pointing to the pixel at the mouse’s location. A program may change the cursor to reflect its state.
> If the mouse button is depressed while the mouse cursor is inside the circle, left-and-right and up-and-down movement of the mouse will rotate the object left-and right and up-and-down on the screen.
> For example, once you have moved the mouse cursor over a small target that is to be dragged, you do not want the act of switching to mouse dragging mode to move the cursor off of the target .
A cursor is a small image that appears on the screen and is controlled by the mouse. (It appears only on the screen, and never in an off-screen bit image.)
Other Macintosh documentation calls this image a "pointer", since it points to a location on the screen. To avoid confusion with other meanings of "pointer" in this manual and other Toolbox documentation, we use the alternate term "cursor".
I remember one particularly annoying one from that era was an analogue clock that used to surround the mouse pointer. I wonder if that still exists anywhere.
This reminds me of cleaning the Comet Cursor[1] adware, which did this (and other random and obnoxious effects), off of people's PCs back in the early 2000s. IIRC, it was bundled with Real Player and usually accompanied with Gator...
This was an OS feature (and still is, at least on Win7), rather than a cheesy webpage effect. The browser was never allowed to know what the cursor looks like, so it's impossible for webpages to implement a native-looking mouse trail that works consistently.
The OS mouse trail was super useful on LCD screens with sluggish pixels: without it, the cursor would be essentially invisible if you moved the mouse too fast. Couldn't use my NEC Ready 120LT without this feature!