(no subject)

[arethinn]

Dear hive mind:

Any suggestions as to what about:config or other tweak I might have made back when using some version of Firefox 2.x (probably, although possibly 1.5ish) that is even now borking my tooltip/alttext/titletext display, so I can fix it?

I seem to recall that this used to be actually broken in some older versions of Firefox (which I've been using since about .7 or .8, albeit not carrying one profile all through it), and that there was also a separate "working as designed" issue along the lines of "but Internet Explorer does it that way" "well that way is wrong and we're not going to do it", and have vague memories of having installed some extension that "fixed" this by forcing the "wrong" thing, displaying alt as a tooltip (I think that's the wrong thing?) and/or something that fixed display of long tooltips by making them wrap so they didn't run off the edge of the screen (which was a separate issue).

Long story short, I can't get the things to display at all now (such as on xkcd, Dinosaur Comics, a softer world, etc. where it is useful to see them), and I'm not sure what lingering modification is responsible. I'm pretty sure it's something stuck in my profile because I kept the existing ones at work and home when I upgraded to Firefox 3, whereas on my laptop I started with a completely fresh install and built the profile from scratch, and it works fine on that machine (also on husband's computer).

I've tried filtering by "tool" and "alt" and "title" in about:config and frobbing the likely entries, but this hasn't produced the desired result. I'd prefer not to have to nuke the profile and start from scratch, if I can (although that would also solve my annoyance with leftover preference entries from extensions I've long since uninstalled, because for some reason that doesn't seem to erase the preference lines they insert into prefs.js or whatever it is).

Comments

[nicanthiel.livejournal.com]

As far as I know, FF2.X removed support for alt text, so that only FF3 has it now

[arethinn]

I think you misunderstood the question. I am running Firefox 3.x but tooltips are not displaying for some reason. I seem to recall tweaking something or several somethings under Firefox 2.x that had to do with this issue, and since I am still using profiles created under 2.x on 2 computers that both display the same problem (and not on two that do not), I am wondering if there may be something lurking in prefs.js or something that is causing them to still not display, that I have not managed to remember/find.

[nicanthiel.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. I didn't catch that you had upgraded to 3. I read it as you were still using your tweaked version of 2.X. Mea culpa :P

[arethinn]

P.S. AFAIK 2.x had support, it just acted in sometimes undesirable ways (such as long ones not wrapping) as well as the philosophical issue surrounding how IE would happily display either alt= or title= in a tooltip, when apparently one or the other of these is not technically correct, and Firefox was doing it the "correct" way which was not the behavior some/many users expected.

[nicanthiel.livejournal.com]

Well, I know for xkcd at least, the alt-text would not show up on mouseover in 2.X, though you could still read it in the properties. But that was my version of FF2; others may have had it different. All I know was that it was a common complaint in the feed comments.

[arethinn]

Well, that's the philosophical issue I was referring to. As I understand it, alt (specifically) is not supposed to be used this way (only title), but Internet Explorer happily displayed either, so many users got used to it and expected Firefox to do the same. At some points in development (I can't cite version numbers) I think it must have, because my personal memory is an "it works, it doesn't, it works again" kind of thing.

Regarding what prompted me to poke this in the first place under prior versions, I remember reading on Bugzilla that this was a closed issue because despite some people thinking it was "broken" or merely inconvenient, doing it that way was wrong and Mozilla wasn't going to implement it that way. In other words they weren't going to support "fixing" bad coding just because people thought it would make the user experience better. It's kind of a "Right Thing" dispute (as in right and good, right and bad, wrong and good, wrong and bad -- displaying alt text as tooltips is apparently "wrong and good"; wrong in some sense, but people tend to want it).

(xkcd is currently using title. I don't know if that's 100% been the case forever or not.)