tooltip behaviour on Windows Vista

Posted By: Brolin Empey | Jul 5th, 2009 @ 3:59 AM
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Comments: 3 | Views: 678
#Jul 5th, 2009 @ 3:59 AM
Brolin Empey
Brolin Empey

Hello,

I use Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 i386.  I have noticed 2 usability issues with tooltips:

  1. When I point over a task button on the taskbar, the tooltip containing the window title is truncated.  This affects Winamp, for example.  This is a minor issue, but it still bothers me because I do not understand why the tooltip is truncated.  Truncation seems unneccessary to me.
  2. The tooltips time out and disappear.  I hate this because it makes it difficult to read long tooltips.  I use Mozilla Firefox, which uses tooltips for the title attributes of elements, such as links and images.  Currently, these tooltips time out and disappear after 5 seconds.  However, according to the comments in bug 395668, this timeout will eventually be disabled.  Until then, the workaround is to use the No Tooltip Timeout extension.  Tooltip timeouts are a major usability issue for me and, I suspect, many other users, but until now I have worked around the problem instead of taking the time to solve the problem.

For each of my 2 issues, I have 2 questions:

  1. Why does the limitation (for truncation) or behaviour (for timeouts) exist?
  2. How can I solve it?

I do not mind if issue #1 is not solved, but I would really like to solve issue #2 by disabling all tooltip timeouts on Windows.  Is this possible?  Issue #2 has bothered me for years, probably since I started using Windows 95 in the second half of the 1990s.

Thank you,
Brolin Empey

#Jul 5th, 2009 @ 5:04 PM
W3bbo
W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

I'm no expert on the subject, but I imagine the timeout exists because users habitually rest their cursors somewhere and since a lot of places have tooltips you wouldn't want it on-screen all the time.

In the past tooltips were no more than a few words, for helpful descriptions you used help popup windows (aka the "What's this" button) which had no timeout but seem to have been phased out in the new Vista HIG documents.

As for #2: It depends on what API you're using to display tooltips (I assume you're a developer?) As for Firefox, besides that "No Tooltip Timeout" extension I can't see anything in about:config, so I guess that's the only way.

#Jul 5th, 2009 @ 6:06 PM
Brolin Empey
Brolin Empey

I have some experience developing Windows applications, but now I am mostly an end user and/or sysadmin.  I am a technical user, though, not someone with no development experience.  I am not a professional developer, but I have taught myself a lot about computer programming and user interfaces, for example.

#Jul 5th, 2009 @ 7:47 PM
joechung
joechung

There is a setting to adjust the timeout of Windows notification dialogs in Windows Vista.  Unfortunately, I don't think tooltips use that setting.  Perhaps this should be an accessibility feature request to add a timeout setting for tooltips in a future release of Windows?

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