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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

My parents were so mad at me when I installed Comet Cursor on the family computer.

I was 9 years old, and I think I had grabbed it from a shady site that had modified it to stuff it with additional adware and malware...the computer went really slow after I installed it, but I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.

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As the above points out, that "shady site" was possibly just the official Comet Cursor website. They themselves were an adware company and a weird, direct bridge from 90s "whimsy" web to modern ad tracking and adware.

I recall Cursor Mania which was a similar idea. It bundled Smiley Central which was a necessity to out-smiley your contacts on MSN messenger. It also prefigured emojis. And it almost certainly came with a generous helping of malware.

Glory days, nonetheless.

Looks like someone continues paying to renew smileycentral.com and cursormania.com every year, but appears to be doing nothing with it. (NXDomain)

The dream isn't over yet.

> I had a totally badass cursor that looked like it was being electrocuted, so overall I think it was a fair trade.

that phrase managed to bring the 9 years old mindset back in my mind. That was awesome, thanks a lot.

"the computer went really slow after I installed it"

This version also appears to be using a lot of system resources. Firefox on Linux is idling at about 6% CPU while reading HN. Go to that web site and the usage goes up to 80% to 90%. Come back here and CPU goes back down to 6% or so.

Interesting, but no repro on macOS/Safari. macOS/Firefox, however, will take up about 50% between the "Firefox" process and a "Firefox isolated web content" process.

This was back in an era when your Windows computer started to feel slow (which inevitably started to happen after a few years) was to take the standard recommendation and reinstall the entire OS. It's so far from the world of an advanced Linux SysOp.

Just to note: CPU percentage isn't that useful these days. CPUs can throttle back their clock speed quite far, so you'll often get numbers that are meaningless that way.

Your conclusion is fairly like to be correct though.

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