After 15+ years as a professional macOS (and Mac OS X, and Mac OS X Server) advocate, I’ve switched industries entirely.  One big change; I now carry a Windows 10 laptop as a daily driver.  There will be a whole ‘nother post about that soon.  In the interim I wanted to pass along a fix for a particularly odd problem I found in Chrome.

Disappearing Mouse Pointer in Chrome

Chrome 60+ (I am on 65) has a nasty habit of making your mouse pointer disappear entirely at launch.  This has affected Windows 10 machines for a couple years now, and while looking for answers I found a Google Product Forum thread that recommended disabling hardware acceleration.

This worked!

So if you’re having the same problem, launch chrome and go to the URL bar if you can’t find your mouse to click it, either read the bonus tip below or hit the “Tab” key until the URL bar is highlighted.

Type:

chrome://settings

And you’ll get a long list, scroll to the bottom and click advanced.

Wayyy down the page you’ll see a slider to “Enable hardware acceleration when available”.

That’s on by default.  Turn it off and you’ll get a prompt to “relaunch”.  Do that too.

After the relaunch you’ll have your pointer back.

Bonus tip:

Before I realized this was a chrome problem, I enabled a mouse property that has been really helpful for me moving across multiple screens, and really helped me find my invisible mouse pointer to disable hardware acceleration in chrome.

Go to settings -> Mouse Properties.

Click the checkbox for “Show location of mouse when I press the CTRL key”, and hit ok:

I was basically jamming the Ctrl key like a madman during the Chrome settings fix above.  I also use it when I get the mouse pointer lost moving between multiple displays.  One of my work displays is 4K and its easy to lose track floating between them all.