25

I want to turn off the feature where whenever I hover over a hyperlink and in the bottom lefthand corner it shows a light blue hover tooltip about where that link goes.

Why do I want to turn it off? It's annoying to me. I am distracted as I work. None of the other browsers do it. Besides, it serves little purpose because it can be spoofed with the onmousedown event on a link. Take for instance ads on Facebook -- those spoof.

I really don't care where a given link goes and wish I could turn that feature off, even if I have to install a Google Chrome Extension.

So, is there a fix to turn the annoying link hover tooltip feature off?

Improve this question
8
  • 13
    Why on Earth would you want to do this? That's one of the best features in my opinion. You don't care where it goes? Suppose someone spoofed the link text and instead it directs to some site that could hurt your computer?
    – jmort253
    Jan 29, 2011 at 7:46
  • 1
    you would go to a browser with a dedicated status bar that shows URL in it rather than live with a hover ? o_0
    – Sathyajith Bhat ♦
    Jan 29, 2011 at 8:44
  • 9
    For those wondering why you'd want to disable this, a big reason for me is that the tooltip almost always covers up something I want to read on the lines below the link. If I get my mouse near a vertical list of links, a tooltip pops up and I can't read the next few lines. Extremely annoying.
    – user65803
    Feb 2, 2011 at 20:31
  • 3
    @Scratch. That's exactly my problem. As a web developer, I sometimes use A hyperlinks for AJAX buttons that aren't necessarily true links. Sometimes the tooltip covers up the button. Sometimes the tooltip appears and gives the impression that the button will make the browser leave the page when indeed it will not. Safari is a webkit browser as well, but they don't have this issue. I wish Google would be flexible and give us an option to toggle this on/off in the HTML code of the page.
    – Volomike
    Feb 5, 2011 at 6:09
  • 2
    Another reason you'd want to remove the status bar: recording a full screen'd video of a browsing session (software tutorial) and you don't want the video junked up with links being displayed in the bottom left corner...
    – mellodev
    Jul 30, 2013 at 1:04

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
15

You cannot turn off the status bar.

Most of the time you're not even supposed to see it. It only shows up when it needs to. It's more convenience than security since you can spoof it with JavaScript.

Even if you didn't want it to appear every time you hover over a link, it's one feature that you just can't turn off.

Improve this answer
2
  • It's more convenience than security since you can spoof it with JavaScript. Actually, that’s not true anymore; most browsers no longer support window.status specifically to prevent link-spoofing. (It seems like de-coupling the status-bar from the link-target, say with dedicated link-target control, would have been a more ideal solution than simply killing off all access to the status-bar which had legitimately useful possibilities.)
    – Synetech
    Mar 1, 2014 at 4:57
  • @Synetech you can spoof it with Javascript by using click handlers. The onclick event will prevent the anchor tag's default navigation, then can navigate the user to somewhere else.
    – Tom Anderson
    Apr 8, 2022 at 4:59
2

On Windows 10 on a second screen (with horizontal task bar on) it hides the status text (gets pushed off the screen).

Was annoying me as I sometimes need to review a link, and suddenly I couldn't see it. If I move Chrome to my primary screen (vertical task bar on) the hover works again.

Improve this answer
0

If:

  1. You can control the invocation of Chrome (like I can, because we are using Chrome for the front-end of a custom app)
  2. You want Chrome to be full-screen (like I do)

you can try Chrome's --kiosk command-line option, which appears not to display link href status hovers.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .