How do I turn off the obnoxious “tooltip”-like pop-ups that show when you hover the mouse cursor over a tab in Firefox? I’m not trying to turn off “tooltips” on webpages — only in Firefox’s own UI’s “tab bar”.
I’m not talking about the “thumbnail previews” (already turned off with browser.tabs.hoverPreview.showThumbnails), and also not browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled, which just changes the look of the “tooltips” slightly. I want nothing to display when hovering tabs. It’s distracting and pointless.
There are of course no GUI settings for this. No advice from ChatGPT or online works. All userChrome.css “tricks” I’ve tried (dozens of them) are ignored by Firefox.
These probably aren’t actual “tooltips” in the HTML sense — likely a div or something.
I’ve enabled the debug stuff which lets you inspect Firefox’s own UI as a DOM tree, but no matter how hard I look in the tab bar area, I can’t find any existence of these “tooltips”. I suspect this is because they are dynamically created as DOM objects with JavaScript “on demand” when hovering over tabs, instead of being already loaded into the DOM tree when the debug tool starts. But then how would I find out what they are called (their ids/classes, in order to hide them in my userChrome.css) since the debug view never updates? Or maybe it does update, but then when I move the cursor out from the tab again back to the “debug window”, it’s removed from Firefox UI’s DOM tree and thus the debug view? I don’t see a way around that.
If I do tooltip { display: none !important; visibility: none; } in userChrome.css, it changes nothing about the tabs/UI but turns off all tooltips inside webpages = the opposite of what I want.
How can I ever find out what they have named their “tab tooltips”? If this is documented anywhere, I’ve been unable to find it. (And most likely outdated and now inaccurate even if it was once written and published somewhere…)
Setting the about:config setting ui.tooltip.delay_ms to a high number does make them go away, but it also makes all tooltips on webpages vanish, which again is not what I want.
Of course, if there is a better way to fix this than hacking userChrome.css, I’m all ears.
If it matters, my Firefox is “140.3.0esr” (Debian 13). Xfce. X11.
