Featured Image Credit: 10'000 Hours / DAMIEN MEYER / Contributor / Getty
Did you know there's a tiny detail in the Window's cursor that many people never noticed?
Instagram page meme.ig reposted a photo of the Window's black and white cursor with red overlaying lines - revealing that it’s actually not symmetrical.
And it's ruining people's weeks. No, seriously.
The post has garnered over 200,000 likes though I'm sure these are mostly from people excited to discover this little-known fact about Microsoft software.
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Within the 1,000 posted comments, people have been summing up their disbelief with the mind-blown emoji.
The first user summed it up by reacting with: 'Ruined your week? Ruined my childhood,' which got over 4,000 likes.
Some have replied with 'Whyyyy' and 'This has always bothered me.'
Others have said: 'Actually it is but he’s using a curved monitor'.
Meanwhile, a select few know-it-alls have chimed in to add: 'We all been known it was asymmetrical. That's nothing new.'
But what's the reason behind this design?
Well, let's go back to the early days of computers.
Without the mouse cursor, modern computers wouldn’t be as popular or user-friendly as they are today.
The cursor helps us interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in a way that’s much easier than using just keyboard commands. It's simple and easy to navigate and it's based on research suggesting that human beings are best at learning things that they see.
The computer mouse was reportedly developed around 1963 by Xerox engineer Douglas Englebart. Back then, the cursor design was originally a simple arrow pointing up but it did its purpose in helping users work a computer.
Plus, early computer screens had low resolution so precise shapes wouldn't be ideal.
But the modern mouse is entirely different, more refined and offers a high level of usability.
Microsoft and Apple have different designs when it comes to the cursor in that the macOS cursor is more straightforward and symmetrical. So, the designers must have known what they were doing.
The question has since arisen after the image started surfacing all over the internet.
One Redditor may have an answer in that he, Markus Dittrich, calls it optical balancing which is done with a purpose.
Other than that, it's something we can never unsee and just have to accept it.
