Comment 202 for bug 527458

Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

Ted Howard: Tooltips are not "functionality", they are one possible way of presenting information. Tooltips work well when you can rely on every item in a group having one (e.g. every button in a toolbar), otherwise time is wasted in hovering over an item waiting for a tooltip that never comes. Most menu titles contain text, so their developers could never reasonably be expected to add a tooltip to every menu title. Therefore, I concluded that the least time-wasting interface would be one where people could build a mental model that menu titles never have tooltips. Any extra information should be presented in other ways: for example as menu items (like the track data in the sound menu), or as text in the title itself (like the time remaining in the new battery menu).

A few of the duplicate bug reports are of the form "Hey, there's no way to see this particular information any more". Those should not be duplicates, because they describe a solvable problem rather than assuming that it must be solved using tooltips.

Treviño: Changing the title on mouseover would cause the menu to widen as you passed over it, and then narrow when you left it. That would make menus on the leading side more difficult to open, especially the one immediately adjacent.