Unable to reproduce the issue on Ubuntu 14.04 using chrome stable 57.0.2987.110, navigated to web pages and mouse hovered on many links, hand pointer was displayed pointing on the link. No black hand was displayed. 

Could you please let us know on which flavor of Linux OS you are observing this.

Thanks.!

Thank you for your response.  I am glad to see this may be a problem with my specific configuration and not a design choice from Chromium! :)

$ uname -a
Linux titan 4.2.0-0.bpo.1-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.2.6-3~bpo8+2 (2015-12-14) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Other information which may be relevant:

 • OpenBox 3.5.3-8

 • Xorg 7.7

 • Xorg Intel driver 2.21.15-2

 • Xorg mouse input driver 1.9.1-1

 • All the files in /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/cursors/ date from 2014, and I checked each one and none is that right-black hand.  (None of them is the left-white hand, either.)

 • I have no ~/.icons/ folder.

 • I don't have a ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file.

 • $XCURSOR_THEME is not defined.

 • My ~/.Xdefaults only has a few lines specific to xterm; nothing general or for Chrome.

 • I created a brand new user, tried google-chrome and reproduced the issue, so this doesn't come from an extension.

Thank you for providing more feedback. Adding requester "ranjitkan@chromium.org" to the cc list and removing "Needs-Feedback" label.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot

Same problem here. Plus, I've noticed that some links can't be clicked anymore in dropdown menus. Exemple here: https://jsfiddle.net/4usegpb5/

I can't click the "Click here" link in the dropdown menu with the left mouse button. Clicking with the middle mouse button works fine, though.

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/57.0.2987.110 Safari/537.36
OS: Debian Jessie

The problem appeared after an apt-get upgrade (which upgraded Chrome and other packages).

OP here, FYI in my Chrome 57 with the cursor issue, I can click the jsfiddle "Click here" link with my left mouse button without issue.  Might be an unrelated issue.

Looks like Chrome is now using XC_hand2 instead of XC_hand1 (https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/appendix/b/).  I'll see if we can change this back

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f5067d43c3ea45f96b7716c1d4f42ef27d982e81

commit f5067d43c3ea45f96b7716c1d4f42ef27d982e81
Author: thomasanderson <thomasanderson@google.com>
Date: Thu Mar 23 00:57:58 2017

X11: Use XC_hand2 instead of XC_hand1

This CL fixes a regression introduced in [1], where one instance of
XC_hand2 was accidentally changed to XC_hand1.  This made the cursor
right-pointing instead of left-pointing [2].

[1] https://codereview.chromium.org/2504743002/
[2] https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/appendix/b/

BUG= 703982 
R=derat@chromium.org

Review-Url: https://codereview.chromium.org/2771733002
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#458963}

[modify] https://crrev.com/f5067d43c3ea45f96b7716c1d4f42ef27d982e81/ui/base/cursor/cursor_loader_x11.cc

Excellent news!  Which future version will that fix fall into?

It should appear in Chrome 59 or later, so it will be ~2 months before this hits stable.  Alternatively, you could install google-chrome-beta or google-chrome-unstable if you want the fix sooner.

Thank you.

FYI if anyone's interested in an easy work-around until then, I detailed how I achieved it in a Gist:
https://gist.github.com/vphantom/97d67328b55a1f1a11370a748da4dc03

 Issue 715980  has been merged into this issue.

While the work around above didn't seem to work for me, changing my default pointer theme worked fine as a workaround for me while I wait for Chrome 59.

Basically, I just symlinked the default theme to a different theme and the pointers in that theme were more to my liking. You can see more about that process here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/746139/gnome-3-how-do-i-get-the-same-mouse-cursors-in-chrome

TL;DR:
cd /usr/share/icons
sudo ln -s Neutral default
pkill chromium
pkill chromium # I find that another couple of processes always respawn, thus this is needed twice
<launch chromium>