Readers of the prominent web comics xkcd would have had the pain at least once. The author adds witty comments to his comic strips using the html ‘title’ attribute of an image. To read this, one needs to hover his mouse over the comics image and Firefox pops up a little tooltip box containing the text. But the comments are often too long and before one can read it fully, the tooltip will timeout.
Unfortunately, this tooltip timeout period is not configurable in Firefox. Not via preferences and neither via about-config.
Well, Thomas Bertels seems to have noticed this and he decided to make a Firefox addon just for this. The addon, aptly named No Tooltip Timeout removes the timeout of tooltips. That means the rollover text would be visible as long as your mouse is over the image. And to make the tooltip disappear, just move the mouse away from the image.
No Tooltip Timeout is a free download for Firefox 1.5 – 3.5 Windows/Linux/Mac.
No Tooltip Timeout [addons.mozilla.org]
Hats off to the author of this article, and to the author of the plugin! Much rejoicing ensues!
...It's the "alt" html attribute, not the "title" attribute.
Nope its the "title" attribute.
Yes. It is the "title" attribute. Long-standing debate in Firefox development was that "title" was (in the HTML spec) to be used for tooltips and other info, whereas "alt" is used to denote what the image is, if the client can't/didn't load the image itself. I think Firefox finally killed off the misuse of "alt" as a tooltip. For a while I had an extension installed that also displayed the "alt" attribute as a tooltip... but since web developers stopped misusing it, I no longer needed it. Go Firefox.
Except that this issue needs a friggin' add-on to solve. This should definitely be an about:config option, at least...
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