I remember, back in the days when I was using Sitecore 6 in Page Edit mode, an blue arrow would highlight the placeholders on the page when I would hover the placeholder name in the in Design Pane.

Now that I'm using Sitecore 6.3, I've realised that this was no longer the case. The only thing that happens is the description of the placeholder (new cool thing !) is displayed at the bottom of the page.

After spending several hours with IE Developer Toolbar (yes..IE Developer Toolbar !!!.. I couldn't use Firefox/Firebug because the Design Mode is not currently supported in Firefox), it finally came down to this :

To make life easier (allegedly) and boost the performance (again...allegedly), all icon files for Sitecore (initially in Directory (sitecore\shell\Themes\Standard) have been zipped up and automatically extracted on the fly when you select an icon from the Icon Choose Screen.. Well that's a good thing..BUT...

The webedit.css (which, I hear you say, is responsible for styling the injected spans that the Page Editor introduces) still references icons/files in the "Themes\Standard" folder.

Result:

Well, since those files are now zipped up, they will no longer be available and thus won't appear on Page Edit Mode.

Workaround:

There are about 10 url references (e.g background:url (/sitecore/shell/themes/standard/Applications/32x32/arrow_right_blue.png) in the webedit.css. Extract the required icons from their respective zipped archives, and change the background url references accordingly

Once this is done, everything was back to normal and we were all happy again.. What a day !! :)