I, personally, hate buttons without cursor:pointer. Hover effects are nice and all, but they're often rather subtle, and your eyes are attuned to the cursor already. Changing it is extremely visible, and gives you immediate feedback that you're hovering something actionable. Anecdotal, but I find I "see" when my cursor enters a clickable region much more quickly if the cursor changes - I click sooner, rather than making sure it's positioned inside the element.
I find that I subconsciously interpret cursor:pointer as "clicking here will do something with GET semantics" vs. cursor:default as "clicking will do something with POST semantics". I feel about the same way about cursor:pointer-styled buttons as I do about plain blue-underlined "Delete" links.
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I, personally, hate buttons without cursor:pointer. Hover effects are nice and all, but they're often rather subtle, and your eyes are attuned to the cursor already. Changing it is extremely visible, and gives you immediate feedback that you're hovering something actionable. Anecdotal, but I find I "see" when my cursor enters a clickable region much more quickly if the cursor changes - I click sooner, rather than making sure it's positioned inside the element.
I find that I subconsciously interpret cursor:pointer as "clicking here will do something with GET semantics" vs. cursor:default as "clicking will do something with POST semantics". I feel about the same way about cursor:pointer-styled buttons as I do about plain blue-underlined "Delete" links.
I wonder if that's born from OS UI semantics... interesting. I wonder what pushed us in opposite directions.