"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.
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!