Were native cursors turned off in Linux for the latest release? Writing feels messier all of the sudden.

Yes, because it was totally breaking everything for many 64-bit Linux users. Were you using 32-bit Linux, or was it actually working for you in 64-bit?

32 bit, and it worked under Chrome, but not Firefox. But I don't use Firefox anyway. I do miss it now, though, especially since it really helped with the screen redraw problem that's been afflicting Linux for the past few months. While naturally it's more important that it not to be totally broken for other users than that it look nice for me, I'd like to keep using that feature. Is there a link to last month's version of the site still active that I could use if I promise not to ask for any support related to it?

Yeah; you can try here:

http://3-12.latest.write-way.appspot.com

I've done some debugging on native cursors today, redoing my implementation. All cursors should use the native cursors in Firefox and IE. The Mac Chrome implementation is horribly buggy, Windows Chrome only slightly so, but I've disabled native cursors for both, and for Safari, which just didn't show anything. (Safari still shows the normal cursor over the cursor images.) Linux is still using the version of the SWF compiled for Flash Player 10.1.

Anyway, the cursors should be less buggy now on beta. To all: let me know if you still see cursors issues on beta.

Did the old version go offline, or does it just have a different web address now? http://3-12.latest.write-away.appspot.com throws a 404. That release was the only one that really worked decently on my linux machine; the current release seems to have some issues related to hardware acceleration that make it painful to use. Any chance it's still alive somewhere?

Unfortunately, we are limited in the number of old versions we can keep around, so we got rid of everything before 4-1 last week.

One thing you could try is changing the user agent string that you're sending to some non-Linux OS and see if you get any better performance. If that works, then maybe I can figure out some way to differentiate between 32- and 64-bit Linux in that regard. Here are some instructions:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/12/changing-user-agent-new-google-chrome.html

Well, setting the user agent to windows and firefox 10 brings back the native cursors, though the method on the page you linked didn't work for me, I had to add an extension to switch the user agent. Not sure what's going on there, but it's probably something screwed up with chrome.

Enabling native cursors via this method seems to fix most of my performance issues. But it only works for chrome. Fine for me, because I use chrome anyway, but flash crashes when I try to load it in firefox pretending to be on windows. Point being, although I'm a happy camper now, I don't think differentiating between 32- and 64-bit linux would be much help, because that doesn't seem to be the (sole) source of the problem. There's something different about the two browsers; chrome works, firefox doesn't. And it's not the flash players, either; I know chrome has its own, but I disabled that in about:plugins and forced it to use the stock version, and even using the stock version the native cursors didn't crash. Then I followed some instructions I found to force firefox to use chrome's flash, and firefox still crashed.

I don't know if there's any useful information in there, but for anyone having issues, try chrome with the user agent set to firefox or ie on windows; it worked for me, ymmv.

Sounds like a real mess. Are you okay having Chrome emulate Windows Firefox 10 for now, then?

Yup I'm good, thanks.