Tooltips are slow to appear and look laggy

[m-mikulica]

Lots of places on the site have little hover hints — e.g. hovering over
EAL5 shows "Semiformally designed and tested". The problem is that these hints take about a
second to show up after you hover, which feels laggy.

The reason is that they use the browser's "built-in tooltip" (plain
HTML title attribute). That built-in tooltip has a fixed delay that cannot be changed.

The site already uses Bootstrap tooltips and those pop up instantly — so we have
two different kinds of tooltips behaving differently.

Fix:
Let Bootstrap handle the native "title" hints too, not just the ones already
marked for it. That makes every hint instant and visually consistent.

[J08nY]

I don't want to burst your bubble, but have you considered that tooltips not appearing near-instantly is intentional? Users move their mouse around a lot, the pop-up can be jarring. I think the browser people spend some time on deciding what this time should be. People may also have disabilities and prefer less movement...

[jborsky]

I don't want to burst your bubble, but have you considered that tooltips not appearing near-instantly is intentional? Users move their mouse around a lot, the pop-up can be jarring. I think the browser people spend some time on deciding what this time should be. People may also have disabilities and prefer less movement...

I wouldn't entirely dismiss it. The delay can be set to whatever we wish, so even if we keep the original delay (for me, it also feels too long, but it can be just a preference), the tooltips will be visually consistent across the page, since Bootstrap tooltips are used elsewhere, so that's at least some benefit. Personally, they are nicer than the native browser ones. Or you wouldn't like them to look like that and be consistent?

For context... This is, of course, a really minor issue and not a priority at all, and it can seem funny to even be bothered by it. Martin is just waiting for my reviews on other tasks and had some extra time today, so I said he could look into it if he wishes.

Don't worry, he will continue working on real tasks, not this kind of stuff.

[J08nY]

No worries here. I think unifying tooltips is a good idea. I wanted to do it way back, but the acronym texts (abbr element) are used quite a lot in some parts of the site, so lets not go overboard with aggressive tooltips. And when doing so, we should perhaps unify how hoverable elements with tooltips look and feel. I think there is a lot of potential to explain some things to the users in the right place (where they see them and don't understand them)..

Perhaps we could then let he user control how much the site explains stuff to them (via tooltips and such). Where by default a new user (or an anonymous one) has all the tooltips shown, but can turn them off. This could be somehow integrated into a "new user experience" together with the getting started tour in #559.

Enough bike shedding for now :)

[jborsky]

I didn't know the term "bike shedding." I learned something new today, thanks! :D It's the right choice of words for this.