Developer turns forgotten 2005 HCI research into a Chrome extension for easier clicking

A developer has built a Chrome extension called MagPoint, inspired by a 2005 academic paper by Grossman and Balakrishnan titled 'The Bubble Cursor,' which proposed making cursor hit areas dynamic to always target the nearest clickable element. The original research demonstrated significant speed improvements in controlled experiments but was never implemented in mainstream browsers or operating systems. MagPoint works by calculating the closest clickable element to the pointer each frame and rerouting nearby clicks toward it, while disengaging beyond a 120-pixel radius to preserve normal behavior in empty space. The extension also pauses its magnetic behavior during text input to avoid interfering with typing. The developer published the source code along with an automated demo-recording pipeline using headless Chromium and scripted cursor paths.