Great article Adam. As a designer/developer, I am as guilty as charged. I honestly think the issue is that most websites/apps use Bootstrap (11,967,039) or other open source css frameworks that have; until recently (Bootstrap 4 Beta 1 removed the hand cursor), applied the hand cursor to the .btn css class.

Another issue is the fact that these frameworks allow button-esk styling to other elements other than buttons. In BS4, you now can have a page that contains <button> <a>, that look identical, but the button doesn’t have the cursor…. resulting in many JIRA issues created by testers telling me “You are inconsistent.”… lol.

I think as more websites upgrade to BS4, this web cultural shift in mindset will happen, only if UI designers allow it to happen.

From other posts below, many referenced Apple guidelines and others… the issue here is that most of companies that wrote these specs do not enforce them. You can go to apple.com and see for your self as every <button> has a cursor hand. This applies for Facebook, Twitter, and Google products too.

For the world to be convinced that buttons do not need cursors, I will patiently wait for Facebook or Google to hold up to this standard before I do.