Question from a reader: My cursor disappears in Chrome on a regular basis. If I don't move the mouse for a few seconds, the mouse cursor disappears. When I move the mouse, the cursor comes back. Annoyingly, as soon as I open any menu in Chrome, the cursor disappears. It won't come back until I close the menu. Very annoying. Any idea what is causing this and how do I fix it?
Our answer: Coincidentally, we also experienced this ourselves. Especially if you right-click a lot on pages (which also shows a menu), it is very annoying. The cause seems to be that the Shockwave Flash plugin has crashed. When you start Chrome Task Manager, you can close the plugin to make sure that's the issue. You can start Task Manager via the menu Manage the current page (the button with the 'document') / Developer / Task Manager . Select Plugin: Shockwave Flash and click the End Process button at the bottom right. The cursor should now be visible again, but all Flash objects will be disabled until you start the browser again.
Chrome Task Manager is useful for closing crashed tabs or plugins.
Gradually we discovered that this problem really only occurred because we never closed the tabs in the browser. We leave many tabs open almost permanently. Even when we close Chrome, we leave the tabs in the browser's memory so that when Chrome starts up again, those tabs are loaded automatically. This setting is in the Options menu / Basic Settings tab / Reopen the pages that were last opened . If after some time this "cursor problem" rears its head again, we close all tabs one by one and restart Chrome completely empty. The problem then goes away for weeks. By the way: this also applies to Chrome variants such as Iron.
