Comet Cursor

» see cometsystems.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i saw a mouse pointer turn into a little cartoon on a website, i was in an internet cafe in turkey, probably around 2003, on internet explorer like everyone at the next machine. i did not know the thing had a name. it just happened on certain sites, the arrow became a logo or a character, and then it stayed that way for a bit. that was Comet Cursor doing its job, and i had no idea it had installed anything.

Comet Systems started in 1997, built around an idea a cofounder named Jamie Rosen had patented: the empty space where your cursor sits was branding nobody was using yet. the Comet Cursor download was free. websites signed up so that visitors would see a custom pointer, and by 1999 something like 55,000 sites were using it, big names like Warner Bros and Comedy Central among them. at its height it claimed around 20 million users.

the catch was how it got onto machines. it gave your computer a unique id and called home whenever you hit a participating site, and in late 1999 it started shipping bundled with RealPlayer. back then internet explorer would let an activex control install itself with no real permission, so plenty of people ended up running it without knowing. that is the part that got it labeled spyware, and PC World later put it on a list of the worst tech products ever shipped.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

for a long stretch the cursor and the spyware label lived side by side. some watchdogs like Lavasoft and Symantec blacklisted it while others did not bother, and the company kept insisting the tracking was harmless. in 2001 it bolted a price-comparison feature onto the software, which is the point where a cute toy for websites turned into something closer to adware sitting in your browser.

~ the postmortem ~

the pay-per-click ad company FindWhat bought Comet Systems in february 2004, and within that year the cursor was quietly phased out of the product line. nothing dramatic, no shutdown notice anyone remembers. the custom pointer that had crawled onto millions of machines just stopped being handed out, and the web moved on to breaking the browser in newer ways. if you were online in the early 2000s you almost certainly ran it at least once, whether you agreed to or not.

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