Bug 118273 – Impossible to hover on variable inspector popup

• Component: Web Inspector
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Paul Miller]

1. Hover on some variable in debugger (object). Make sure there is another variable just under the current one.
2. Make sure the popup is at the bottom from your mouse, not on the side or at top.
3. Try moving mouse on the popup. The popup will dissapear and new popup will be created because you’ve moved your mouse on the top of other variable.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/14327790>

[Joseph Pecoraro]

Yeah, this should really be improved. Currently it behaves very much like tooltips, but you can't select / interact with tooltips and you can with these popovers. A few times I've gone to expand an object in the popover and the popover unintentionally changed to a different object (under the popover).

Often times a workaround is to carefully move the mouse around content back into the popover from a side. However that is just a workaround and isn't always possible.

[Matt Holden]

I was playing around with some possible solutions that involved adding a delay before switching popovers, but I didn't like them.

I'd like to propose that instead, the functionality be added that you can make a popover "sticky" by clicking on the represented token. 

In the "sticky" state:
a) The user can move the mouse anywhere without dismissing the popover.
b) The represented token would have on a higher-contrast highlight color to help provide user feedback and make this feature more discoverable.

To dismiss the popover and exit the sticky state, you could:
a) type text into the text editor, or
b) click outside the popover

I'd be happy to try to create this patch if anyone feels like this would be a good solution.

[Timothy Hatcher]

Interesting idea. Sounds worth trying if you want to do it.

[Blaze Burg]

This behaves fine enough if you move your mouse around the other variable when moving it down to the popover. Closing.